One problem in Judging - is that competitors feel they must take lessons from the Judges if they want to be marked up. Worse, many competitors feel if they take some lessons and stop, they will be marked down lower than they were before.
The new rules for judging Ice Skating.
The ISU strongly support that judges should not be named and identified so as to significantly reduce the risk of outside influence on Judges as well as the evaluation of the Judges performances leaving no room for favouritism by the evaluating bodies.
Would this be a good system for ballroom dance competitions.
As reported on Dancesport UK.

It's going to be hard to keep the judges anonymous when they're standing right there along the edge of the dance floor with their little hand-held devices.

To remain anonymous, they would be forced to judge by remote viewer, an unsatisfactory situation.

Exactly how do you imagine that anonymous judging would be implemented? Bags over the heads suggest some medieval tribunal.



jj

This is a nice idea. However, in ballroom dancing, the judges stand around the edges of the floor whereas in ice skating, I believe that they sit in a box to the side. In ballroom, it is impossible to keep a judge annoymous because as soon as a dancer dances past the judge, they will recognize them. Additionally, one advantage of knowing and training with the judges is that you can learn what they are specifically looking for. Also, I have had judges who I have trained with mark me down as they knew the level of my dancing and felt that I was not dancing where I could/should have been. I do not take this as a negative thing as instead it tells me that I need to push harder to do my best.

Also, based on how each judge marked me, it can give me some idea what I need to work on. If one judge marked me poorly and I know that they are big on style and performance, but a judge who emphasises technique marked me well, I will know that my technique is good, but I need to work on presentation and performance. For me, I like knowing who the judges are as it helps me know what they think I am lacking and where I need to focus my efforts.

I think perhaps polished is suggesting that the names of the judges not be revealed before the event.

At any rate, it doesn't matter all that much who the specific judges are, because there are still a relatively small group of people to choose from.

What polished is really bothered by is the idea that someone might be judged by someone they have taken coaching with.

But concealing who the judges for an event are won't really change that, because the people qualified to be judges have a very high overlap with the people who have the expertise to be the most helpful coaches.

We really only have one set of experts in dancing. In skating they have people who are not competent to coach who are trained specifically to judge, but they judge by the book - they do not necessarily have any personal experience in the activity at all!

If your overwhelming concern is to eliminate anything that could give the appearance of unfairness, and you are willing to risk the judgment of "book experts" with little practical experience, then you like the olympic skating method. But note that it has had many highly publicized accusations of unfair judging!!

If on the other hand you want to be judged by people with hands on expertise in the activity, you prefer the current ballroom method, and accept the risk that many of the competitors will have studied with many of the judges (at the top level, change both instances of "many" to "almost all" - at which point it hardly matters)

One thing rather inconsistent in Polished's position is that he appears in trying to adopt skating's method to want to hand the training of a body of judges without coaching experience (who would be prohibited from coaching) to the IDSF, despite being a frequent critic of some of the more outrageous things the IDSF does as a result of having bureaucrats rather than dancers in charge.

So in the end there's a choice: you can have dancers in charge and risk that they won't be fair, or you can have bureaucrats in charge and risk that they will do ridiculous things out of ignorance. Whichever way is chosen, current experiences in dancing and skating seem to indicate that:

- The people in charge will treat each other in an infantile way

- The more the activity becomes a competition between nations rather than a competition between individuals (couples), the higher the stakes and the greater risk of actual (as opposed to perceived) corruption.

There actually is a very LARGE group of qualif. people for judging... they just dont get asked !!..

its a bit of an oligarchy in many respects ( Scriv, is a classic e.g... he was never asked to judge the British )

In addition, convenience often rules over expense ( flights etc. )and that does limit choices .

Anonymous. Do you believe that a couple would travel a 1000 miles and back to spend a weekend having lessons with a coach who in five weeks is judging a major competition that they are competing in. Would this happen if it was not known that that judge was judging. Just think of the expense involved with air fares, hotel accomodation, eating and taxi fares and so on.
What about the couple who were three times finalists and twice a runner up. When they cut down on there lessons which were equally as far away as the first mentioned coouple. Six weeks before the event were told over the phone that this year they wouldn't reach the final. And they didn't.
I doubt small studio competitions will ever be clean. But major competitions should be.
If it is not possible to hide the judges identity. Then why not make sure nobody knows who will judge what event on what panel by choosing like the Loto where a number drops out of a globe at random. I doubt if anybody would spend some thousand dollars if they were not sure that that teacher was not judging.

Serious dance competitors will work with the top experts whenever they can manage it, regardless if they are judging or not.

Truly serious amateur competitors have amateur partners.



jj

Anonymous. Putting everything else aside and staying with the one question. Answer please. Do you believe that the results of a competition can be fair if one or more of the judges have on the floor in front of them a couple or couples who are having lessons with them.
The other side of this sordid story is that they the judge will be more severe with their markings towards a couple they are teaching. That also would not be fair either would it.
Yet another side to this story is . If as a judge you have two couples before you . One you know and the other you dont know. Dance wise you cannot seperate them. Which one are you most likely to pick.
Explain to me how it can be possibly fair for an ajudicator or adjudicators to be marking their own pupils when on the floor there are others who they dont know from Adam

"Putting everything else aside and staying with the one question. Answer please. Do you believe that the results of a competition can be fair if one or more of the judges have on the floor in front of them a couple or couples who are having lessons with them."

While it's not the ideal situation, I do believe it to be fair in the overwhelming majority of cases, and much superior to a situation in which none of the judges met any of the competitors' standards for being a worthy coach.

Concealing the list of judges won't help, because it is their expertise not their role in judging a particular competition that makes them desirable as coaches.