No matter how many times you’ve run a district meet, or a particular contest, there is always at least a 50-50 chance that some problem will arise that you’ve never encountered before and would never have anticipated. (Some of you more experienced hands out there might argue that the probability is closer to 100 percent, but let’s try not to scare the beginners.) The same is true for us at the state level.
Every year, we go through the painstaking process of the reviewing all the contest rules, looking for ways to make things clearer and to make your job easier as a meet director or contest director. We update and modify our manuals and handbooks and revise our instructions and procedures.
But inevitably, some new and unexpected problem will come up, providing the motivation to go through the whole review and revision process again.
A couple of cases in point….
Last school year, I lost count of the number of phone calls I received with questions about grading the Music Memory contest. Based on lessons learned from that experience, this year we included a set of grading guidelines with the district Music Memory materials. These guidelines (which are also available on our Web site) address the most common questions about grading the contest, including some of those “what if” situations that produced so much debate during the grading process.
The result has been a dramatic decrease in the number of questions about grading Music Memory. This year I can count the number of those calls I’ve received on one hand…well, maybe two hands…and a foot. But still, the number of questions has declined substantially, which I hope indicates that Music Memory contests are running more smoothly across the board.
This year, a somewhat similar lesson has come from the Art contest. A frequent question about grading Part A concerns whether contestants must include the artist’s first name when they write their answers. That’s an easy answer — no. The official list that appears on our Web site and in the front of Art Smart includes only last names, so that is all that is required for a correct answer. But that’s where this year’s new wrinkle came in.
The contest rules are specific that contestants must list the artist’s name and title of the work as they appear on the official list. The reason for this is to avoid potential problems with discrepancies in spelling or wording that might appear in other sources.
However, at least one contest director (and I suspect more than one) interpreted the rule to mean that if a contestant included the artist’s first name, then the answer was automatically incorrect since the official list does not include first names.
In hindsight it’s easy to see how someone could interpret the rules this way, but it’s definitely not what was intended. So for next year we’ll clarify those rules, and we may issue grading guidelines for Part A of Art similar to what we now have for Music Memory.
So there are unexpected situations that come up which cause us to reexamine our rules and procedures and make needed clarifications and adjustments. And then there are unexpected situations that just leave you scratching your head.
I received an anguished e-mail from a parent a few weeks ago concerning a very unfortunate circumstance that occurred at her daughter’s district meet. Her daughter was an alternate for second-grade Storytelling, but she and her event coach were under the impression that alternates would be allowed to compete. So this little girl arrives at the meet in her Sunday dress, only to be told that in fact alternates could not compete, and so she could not participate in the contest.
Now, allowing alternates to compete is a rule violation because it exceeds the allowed number of entries per division. But even though meet officials were ostensibly following UIL rules, that does not justify creating a situation in which a 7-year-old is left crying in the cafeteria. The far better solution would have been to allow her to participate, and to instruct the judges ahead of time simply not to rank her in the contest.
I have no doubt that there are many other sides to this story concerning who told what to whom and when. But what’s most important here is a principle that we should always strive to follow — to the greatest extent possible, kids should not suffer because of mistakes made by adults. That is especially true for our youngest competitors.
We certainly want all UIL meets to be run “by the book,” but it’s also essential to remember that the spirit of the rule is almost always more important than the letter of the rule. UIL competition should always be positive, educational and enjoyable for every student who participates.
Not every contestant can win, but if they come away feeling good about their experience, you know you’ve run a successful meet.
The correct scoring procedure is five points for correct answers and deductions of FOUR points for incorrect answers, not two-point deductions as indicated in the 2006-07 Constitution & Contest Rules and A+ Handbook. The plus five, minus four system is the one that was in place in prior years, so the correction is simply a return to the previous rules. Additional information is available on the UIL Web site.