Phil Daley wrote:
At 7/22/2005 12:57 AM, Mark D Lew wrote:
>I agree with John Howell that any individual can be rejected for
>specific reasons which might be correlated with his sex, without the
>need for a blanket rule banning the sex outright. The idea of
>auditioning the voices blind is interesting, but I think it's
>ultimately unrealistic.
I am surprised that any states do not use blind judging.
How do they eliminate the possibility that a judge would know a student
and then use that information in the resulting rating?
The states I have worked in all used blind judging.
New Hampshire did away with blind judging several years ago.
I asked a teacher about that issue of the teacher knowing the student
and therefore judging on overall knowledge of how the student could
perform vs. a one-shot, first-impression audition with students the
teacher didn't know.
His reply was interesting -- the logic behind it was that since they
were already using New Hampshire teachers as judges, an inordinate
number of particular teachers' were making it in anyway, since the
interpretation they were looking for at the audition would have been the
interpretation they taught their students, so other interpretations
would have gotten lower grades. Additionally, he felt that in general
the teachers would be as impartial as any human being could be, knowing
them personally and trusting their integrity. So doing away with the
screens made it easier to set up for auditions and apparently was less
unnerving for the students.
Besides, even with a blind audition, a teacher knows his/her own
students' tones, techniques, which mistakes they always make, and if
anybody wanted to ensure their own students make it in without any
doubt, all that teacher has to do is to give them a short, unmistakable
warm-up riff to play before playing the selections. So a student plays
that riff just to ensure valves are working, reed is in place, nothing
anybody would question, and then plays the selections and the teacher
knows to give them a higher score, if that teacher were bent on cheating.
The only way to have truly effective auditions is to have 3 judges for
each audition, all from out of state, and that's something most state
music teacher associations can't afford.
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
_______________________________________________
Finale mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
