RE: Mock Judging Results - Ken's Points

["James Purchase" <jpurch@interlog.com>]

Ken recently made some excellent points -

Re: Screening out Fakes - I agree that we are going to have to be very
careful about screening out something without first doing some
investigation. The first part of the investigation could be to require
people to give us a list of materials, plants and fish in the tank. If we
see something in the photo which is not on the list.....or vice versa.....
that is at least a start. Again, I don't know if this will even be a
problem, but it is a _potential_ problem and we should have a policy on how
we want it dealt with _should_ it arise.

Re: Submission Elements, number of Images per submission - I definately want
to see more than one image of a tank and less than 5 but that is more to be
fair to the aquascape and the aquarist who submitted it than anything else.
It is very difficult to judge a tank with only one picture and having too
many can lead to problems like we had with Entry 005.

Submission  Elements - like a listing and description of how the aquascape
was put together, i.e. materials used, plant and fish list will not only
help screen out potential fakes, it will help us place tanks into Categories
for Judging and display. It isn't always obvious in a picture that that
beautiful piece of driftwood just right of centre is in actuallity printed
on a commercially made background, or even that those nice red plants are
100% plastic. We can ask for those sorts of details in the Submission
elements.

Contest Entries which come in without the required elements should be placed
in the Showcase but not the Contest (this shouldn't cause concern - life has
certain rules, if we set a few and people choose to ignore them, they can't
complain about the consequences. I am tired of pandering.).

Re: Point Scores and consistency between judges - I can see the point that
Ken (and earlier Erik) makes about it being nearly impossible to force
Judges to ALL play by our rules - they are going to have their own ideas and
nothing we can do or say will change that. I found it fascinating to look at
how the individual Judges scored the various entries and also to real their
comments. This has the potential to be VERY educational for everyone.

 But I have to tell you, while I was putting the scores and comments into
the web-site, in some cases it was MURDER trying to figure out how some of
the mock judges arrived at their scores or in translating what they passed
to me into the numbers which appear on the web-site. If numbers from
different judges appear side by side, they should at least be on the same
order of magnitude.

I think we will have to tell them that the scale for each Criteria is 0 -
100. Once they arrive at their decision, they multiply it by whatever
percentage value the particular Criteria point carries, and then report THAT
value. If someone wants to start at 50, and mark upwards to 100 that's cool
with me - at least they will be consistent with themselves. But we had some
judges do this on the basis of 1-10. I was getting very confused, jumping
back and forth between their e-mail, an Excel spreadsheet, and the web-site
opened in Front Page. Sometimes, a 17" monitor is just NOT big enough! Once
I got them all sorted out and in place, they all made sense, but it was NO
FUN doing the sorting out and trying to figure out how they got their
numbers - in one case, I just had to leave out a judge's individual criteria
points because I was just too tired to worry about it anymore. This isn't a
crack at the judges - or how they did this, I'm just saying that without
specific guidelines provided up front which we ask each judge to adhere to,
I'm going to be bald before this is over.

Re: Categories - I can see the validity of what Ken says about Categories,
and I think I had suggested long ago that we forego that kind of discussion
until later or until we actually get the images. We'd look awfully stupid to
pre-announce 50 to 100 specific Categories and then only get 10 entries for
the whole Contest. But the kinds of Categories I was thinking of here, and
now, are really rather wide ranging and general, as in the following:

Underwater Gardens - only natural materials allowed
Underwater Gardens - natural and man-made materials allowed
Biotope Tanks - only natural materials allowed, and the tank must be an
attempt to re-create a specific natural environment.
- Planted
- Non-Planted
Rift Lake Tanks
Community Tanks - plastic and man made materials allowed
Fantasy Tanks - anything goes, so long as the image is REAL.
etc.

These are _only_ suggestions and I'm putting them forward now because I can
forsee major logistical problems for Erik if he has 200 entries of all types
and he has to try sorting them out himself before he burns a CD-ROM without
having at least _some_ idea of general categories to go by.

We _could_ have them sorted like that, burnt onto CD-ROM, distributed to
several people for screening and sorting into more specific Categories (as
numbers warrant, I venture) and then just the Entry numbers would have to
traverse the Internet, as the pre-screeners sorted out among themselves how
the Entries should be grouped for Judging and Display.

Once the pre-screeners have reached a concencus - a "master list" could go
to Erik and the appropriate Entries could be placed into specific
subdirectories on the CD-ROMs which we pass to the Judges.

This is just me thinking out loud about the co-ordination/logistics bit that
Ken mentioned.

Re: Categories and 1st, 2nd and 3rd Place - one thing that we have to keep
in mind is that when we announce this publicly and invite people to submit
entries, if it is a Contest they are going to expect to know what the Prizes
are going to be (even if there ARE going to be prizes). Again, it would look
dumb to pre-announce all these ribbons and certificates in a zillion
Categories and not have the entires to pin them to. Conversly, without a bit
of incentive, we might not get a lot of entries unless we DO tell folks what
they could stand to win (I was never a fan of "Door Number Three, Please").

Re: Judges getting the entries on CD-ROM - I got to cheat on this, I know -
I have all of the images on my hard-drive so I didn't have to wait for
things to download (of course, it DID take a while to get the web-site set
up...). One test judge told me that it took most of her afternoon to review
the small number of images that we had, primarily because of  Internet
delays. Having these things on CD-ROM's will be the only way that we can get
Judges to do this.

Great feedback Ken!

James Purchase
Toronto


  ------------------
  To unsubscribe from this list, e-mail majordomo@aquatic-gardeners.org
  with "unsubscribe aga-contest" in the body of the message.
  To subscribe to the digest version, add "subscribe aga-contest-digest"
  in the same message.
  Old messages are available at http://lists.thekrib.com/aga-contest