Judging Quantitativeness?

[Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com>]

Hi guys, glad to see things are getting back on track.

Some of the issues I'm hearing crop up are "dealing with non aquatic
plants", "rating things quantitatively", and "odd categories (like most
original)".

One thing I've seen in home shows and local annual shows is a score card
kept by each judge.  For fish, these cards have something like 100 total
possible points, and they divy up the points in several categories (like
0-10 based on fin quality, 0-10 for appropriate size, 0-5 for
deportmant, etc).  We could develop some form of "scorecard" for the
judges based on the different aspects we think are important for the
contest, and weight the point values accordingly.  This makes it easy to
pick a first, 2nd and 3rd from all the judges' cards.

This can also be used to pick some specialty prizes like "most original"
or "best of show".  At the home shows, the judges often get together at
the end as well, to award some unusual prizes based on standouts that
could not be recorded on the card.

So what would we use as the factors?  Some possibilities might be
"artistry things" (maybe some of you have a better way to subdivide this;
I'm not an artist, I'm a tech nerd!), "originality", "use of appropriate
plants", "biotopically correct" (?), "quality of photo/text presentation"
(maybe only give a couple of points for this, as we don't want it to be a
photo contest), "balance with fish".

So this kills our other problem of how to deal with non-aquatics.  I'm not
a fan of disqualifying people outright for using bog plants, but they
could get zero "appropriate plants" points for doing this.

What do you think, sirs?

-- 
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com

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