Dear icedancer2 and amazing judges on this forum, I truly appreciate all the details you share about judging, they are the most interesting to read!
Thank you. I really appreciate it. I love skating and I love judging because I have learned so much more about skating from becoming and being a judge - there is always more to learn!
I just wanted to make another comment about the pass/fail idea for tests with no numbers involved. Would that be pass/fail for the whole test or each individual move?
Pass/fail for the whole test would be really easy for us judges but would give the skaters absolutely no feedback. HOWEVER in the old days when I was a kid skating in the 60s I don't ever remember seeing any numbers or getting any feedback from the judges. The availability of the xerox machine was pretty limited and we never got copies of the judges scores, etc. So you would just find out if you passed or failed. And it used to be that you had to pass all three judges to pass a test. There were other ridiculousnesses also such as if after 3 or so figures (on figures tests) they didn't think you were going to pass the test they would stop the test. It was called "getting pulled" (from the test). I had this happen on my 2nd figure test and it was pretty devastating. There was no explanation except that it wasn't going to pass and so they just stopped the test (lots of people's tests got stopped that day).
So back to the question of pass/fail and no numbers at all for individual moves: this is the case for Pre-pre and Pre-Bronze Moves and the Pre-Pre and Pre-Bronze FS tests. If one move is not up to passing standard, then what to do? As a judge you have a choice: pass the whole test anyway as it is an encouragement test and then have people wonder why it passed even though one move was clearly not skated "up to standard" or you fail the whole test because one move was not giving a "pass".
The way rest of the tests are set up now, with numbers given for each element (in Moves) - you have more leeway as a judge to pass the test even if there was one move that was clearly not a passing move, IF there is a move that you can justify giving a higher mark than the passing average mark. Then the test will pass. Sometimes it's a matter of thinking of the test as a whole and thinking (in the 30 seconds that you have to make your marks) "Is this a passing test" and then making your marks reflect that. If each individual move was pass or fail then I would guess that you might have to get all passes for the test to pass. Or there would be some other rule implemented that would say that you could pass with maybe one or two "failed" moves. But then... well, you can see how this could get and then you would still have some disagreements between judges (because we all have different focuses (foci?) in our skating, different experiences, different expectations - and you would still have some people who are dissatisfied or discouraged about their marks and their ability to pass or fail a test... on that day, with that panel.
So I guess I would just have to say that if you are testing it is best to have a great attitude and just love your skating and skating in general. Not everyone is going to pass every test. That is not the point. If you don.t want to test then that is okay too because there are so many other ways to enjoy skating besides testing...
Anyway, I guess I could go on and on and will continue to learn and grow through this process. I do appreciate this board and other skating-related internet boards because it gives me an idea of what people are thinking and I hope that it has made me a better judge. I would love to see the Adult testing structure change even more than it has although I kind of doubt that I will be joining any related committees anytime soon, LOL.