Stephen Clarke: Moving Away from Identical Score Obsession

Opinions

I read with interest Michael Klimke's guest column on Eurodressage, particularly his comments regarding dropping the high and low scores from individual judges. I truly wish we could get away from this obsession that all judges must come up with identical scores.

Surely the principle of having three, five or even seven judges is to end up with a fair and balanced score that takes into account the impression from all the various angles. There are several movements that can, and should, receive a different score depending on the angle of view. For instance a horse that is constantly a little short in the neck and behind the vertical will be more obvious to see from the side rather than the front view, and should receive lower scores from the judges on the long side. The same situation would apply for the last Piaffe at X that maybe travels too much forwards. To the side judges it would be obvious, whereas from in front it may still appear fairly good. Therefore it would be correct to have different scores from the different positions around the arena. There are many other examples.

This idea of dropping the high and low scores, as has been pointed out through statistical analysis, makes no significant difference to the end result. Therefore I would wonder why are we even considering it?

However, Human nature being as it is, has anyone even considered the psychological effect it would have on the officiating judges at the competition, and the 'knock on effect' it would have on the riders? No judge would want it to be their mark that was constantly dropped (be it the high mark or the low mark) and could therefore have the effect of making individual judges 'too careful' rather than encouraging them to be brave enough to react truly and confidently to what they see.

Also this principle, if adopted, would reverberate throughout the judge training situation within the FEI Courses and Seminars. Presently, as Course Directors we are constantly striving to encourage judges to be confident enough to reward good work with high scores, which the riders deserve! And to award low marks when there are obvious problems.

This system of dropping high and low scores would make a mockery of the way in which we try to train our judges, but more seriously it could create a 'dumbing down' of the scores which would be absolutely unfair to the riders that spend years of training in order to produce their horses to the high level that we see today.

Isn't that why we have the JSP there to act as a 'safety net' should a judge make an actual honest mistake, which no-one minds being corrected? As David Stickland implies, with this 'dropping of high and low scores' The JSP would become redundant.

If this system is to be even considered, I would suggest that we do some serious phycological studies as well as mathematical ones.... I see a lot of 6.5's on the horizon if this idea was to be taken forward, and for sure we can certainly kiss goodbye to the 10's...

If that's what the riders want, then so be it.....but personally I see it as a hugely backward step for the sport.

by Stephen Clarke, President IDOC and FEI Judge General