Variation in Judging Standards

Te Ao Hou, December 1965, Page 45

Variation in Judging Standards Organisers of big competitions should consider the use of a judging panel. No judge can mark carefully, or criticise accurately, a series of different items following one after the other. It is best to have one judge who looks at the action song performed by each group, another who does haka, a third who does poi, and so on. This makes for more careful and less hurried judging, and helps dispel allegations of favouritism since no one judge marks all the items performed by each group. This brings us to the actual quality of the judging, and this is probably the most contentious point of all. At the moment there is considerable variation in standards and much displaying of personal preference. In one competition (where there were two judges for each

item—a bad arrangement), one group was given 70 points for an action song by one judge, and 30 points by the other. This is ridiculous. One of those judges simply could not have known his business. In another competition a group was marked down heavily because a single action in their version of ‘Ruaumoko’ was contrary to what the judge thought it should be. Yet the group has learned the haka from an acknowledged expert.