Speech & Interview Schedules

[KScarberry]

How would you schedule your local, state and/or national Speech &
Interview (SpeInt) Competition?

Would you stagger decathletes so that the entire team does not go at
the same time?
Would you group teams with similar scores together?
Would you pull names out of a hat and put them in a random order?

What would you do to make this portion of an AD Competition fair for
all teams taking into consideration some teams are more competitive
than others?

Thanks, in advance, for those willing to share your perspectives on
this item. Please consider responding and sharing your view.

[Maria Agazaryan]

I'd actually rather all of my team was being interviewed or giving their speech at the same time. It gets so confusing when it is staggered and we often don't know which end is up!

As for grouping based on scores...what scores would you use? the previous years' scores?

Maria

Maria C. Agazaryan
Coach, Birmingham HS Academic Decathlon Team
Co-Chair, American Cancer Society SFV Relay for Life
Advisor, Birmingham HS Interact Club and Knights & Ladies
Immediate Past President, Los Angeles City Teachers' Math Assoc.


Go Bruins!

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[Tom Ri]

I don't have a problem with staggered schedule - I think it's the fairest
way to ensure that judge fatigue is minimized.

However, judge rest breaks and judge score calibration is critical.  With
AP exams (and the former Golden State exams) subjective grading of
essays is prepared for by an extensive, detailed training session.  There
is ongoing calibration to ensure that scores dont meander off the "center."

I think if we are to minimize unfair scoring, judge training and calibration
has to be implemented.

This past year at LA County, the schools were broken up into an early
start and a late start group, with about 27-28 teams in each, according
mostly to their geographic location.  90% of the speech medals went
to the late start schools.  And this had nothing to do with the quality
of the teams, as there were high scoring teams in both groups.

This is statistically significant and led to a discussion of how to avoid
this problem in future years.  Judges scoring habits change during the
day.

Tom Riley
Mark Keppel HS
Alhambra, CA