[MR] A&S Judging Question Part Two

[Alan MacNeill]

Lots of possible reasons (and no, I don't know if any of these are
actually pertinent to any given situation):

1.  It wasn't explained as clearly in the docs as you think.  a
paragraph on page 7 may or may not be "clear" depending on the context
etc.  If the docs were written poorly, the judge may have missed what
they were trying to say
2.  The documentation didn't match the piece, for whatever reason.
3.  Time pressure.  Sometimes, judges have all the time they need and
can read every word of the docs.  More often, they have nowhere near
enough time and have to rely on a skim job.  This is what an
"executive summary" solves
4.  The explanation given was deemed inadequate by the judge.  They
may have expected more (or seen more from another piece in the
competition).  One sentence explaining the genesis of the piece isn't
going to get as high a mark as a well written 3 paragraph explanation
accompanied by pictures of an exemplar.
5.  We're volunteers.  People make mistakes, we don't pay our judges,
we don't train them much, we just say "Go judge that stuff over there"
and hope it works.



On 10/17/07, Sigrune at aol.com <Sigrune at aol.com> wrote:
> Lots of good ideas and lots of good commentary, but I for one still have not seen an explanation of why one is given a low score for something that is clearly expalined in the documentation.