Coaches Corner

Judge Training Events

ALL Judges MUST attend an ALL DAY Judge Training in late February, or early March. It is here that Judges learn the mechanics of being an Odyssey Judge, the responsibilities of the job and the specifics of the Long Term Problem so that all of the Judges are in sync with each other.

Coaches, if your Judge cannot attend, you MUST find another judge and let the Association Director know who is coming and which judge they are replacing. So Coaches, make sure your Judge knows where and when to go for training and why it is so important. Since CTOM is almost completely volunteer driven, we require each team to provide a judge, it's how we staff the State Tournament. Being a judge is fun as well as being important to the teams who have been working on their solutions since October! Students are usually quite proud to tell others that their parent or teacher is a Judge at Odyssey of the Mind!

Judges also MUST attend the all day State Competition. Reminder: JUDGES MAY NOT VIEW THEIR TEAM'S PERFORMANCE. We have judges who think everything students do is wonderful and we have others who are harder to impress. We love both kinds of judges! But, since we place our judges on Judging Teams and when we are missing a judge or we replace a rigorous judge with one who scores more generously! Being a job of an Odyssey Judge requires judges to be as consistent as possible. If you score the answer "Barney, the purple dinosaur" as creative for the first team, you must score that answer the same way, even if you have heard it 22 times that day! We lose this consistency and an element of fairness if we are missing judges or replacing them, so we don't.

 

 

TESTIMONIALS

"It teaches kids to work as a team and that hard work and creativity will get you anywhere!"

- Team Member, Middle School