Introduction Madam Toastmaster, fellow Toastmasters. Perhaps I could start with a quick show of hands. How many of you have been a judge in a competition? And how many of you feel completely comfortable with what you have to do? Thankyou - lots of judges, and I suspect, lots of discomfort. Well in this speech, I’d like to help. As this is a Toastmasters meeting, my speech will be in the traditional three sections. First I’ll cover the role of a judge, and then go into more detail about the criteria you use when judging. Finally, I’ll give you some advice about the role of the chief judge. By its very nature the material is a tad dry and technical in parts - but if you can get through it, you can listen to Bob. Role of judge So, imagine someone’s asked you to judge at a contest for the first time. The most important thing is to follow the advice of Douglas Adams: don’t panic. You just need listen to the speeches, go to the voting slip at the bottom of your judging form, fill in the names of your 1st, 2nd and 3rd choice contestants, write your name on the form and sign it. That’s all there is to it. To help you reach your choice, you can use the judging criteria in the top half of the judging form. These let you give each contestant a score out of 100, on sensible criteria like structure, voice and body language. I’ll say some more about these criteria in a moment. But it’s worth noting that you don’t have to score the contestants; and even if you do, you’re perfectly at liberty to ignore the scores altogether when casting your votes. Once the contest begins, you can just sit down and enjoy the speeches. After each speech, there’ll be a minute’s break to let you fill in your scores; after the last speeches, there’ll be a break of two minutes to let you complete the voting slip. Tear off the completed voting slip and hand it to the counters: and that’s all there is to it. A few important points to note. First, ignore the timing of the speech, even if the speech was obviously too long; even if it was too short. That’s someone else’s problem. Second, avoid bias and treat all the contestants equally. This can be tricky in area or division rounds, where there may be one contestant from your club who you know very well: the best advice I can give is just to do your best. Third, you must completely fill in your voting slip, otherwise it’ll be void: vote for three contestants, write your name on it and sign the form. Fourth, don’t talk about your votes afterwards: the whole process is meant to be secret. Finally, one of the judges is nominated as a tie-breaking judge. The only difference is that you vote for all the contestants: 1st place all the way down to 9th or whatever. The tiebreaking judge’s form is only used in the event of a tie after the vote-counting process; otherwise it’s ignored altogether.
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Judging criteria I’d now like to look at the judging criteria in the top part of the judging form. To do this, I’ll run through the criteria for the speech contest, and then for the evaluation contest. Some aspects are easier to understand than others: I’ll try to make it as clear as I can. First of all, the speech contest. The criteria, like ancient Gaul, are divided into three parts: content gets 50 marks out of 100, delivery gets 30 and language gets 20. Let’s start with content. This is itself divided in three: speech development, effectiveness and speech value. Speech development gets 20 marks out of 100 and covers the material in speech 3 of the basic manual. Structure: opening, body, conclusion. Was the speech easy to follow? Was it supported by facts, illustrations and examples? Skipping on to speech value, this gets 15 marks and is more about the ideas and content in the speech. Was the material original, valuable, worth listening to? Finally, effectiveness also gets 15 marks. This is a bit trickier, and a bit more subjective. Could you determine the speaker’s purpose? Did they achieve it? And what was the audience’s reaction? Perhaps I could draw an analogy with a TV advertisement here: an effective advertisement is one where you remember the name of the product. Delivery has three areas: physical, voice and manner. Physical gets 10 marks and covers speech 4 of the basic manual: gestures, eye contact and body language. Voice gets 10 marks and covers speech 5: clarity, pitch, rate, volume and variation. Manner (10 marks) is a bit harder: it covers the speaker’s confidence, enthusiasm, assurance and selfprojection. Finally, language has two areas: appropriateness and correctness. Appropriateness (10 marks) is speech 6: did the speaker use effective words and word images to communicate their ideas clearly and vividly? And correctness (10 marks) is about the accuracy of grammar and pronunciation. The humorous speech and table topic contests have judging criteria that are very like those for the speech. I’ll leave figuring those out as an exercise for the listener. The criteria for the evaluation contest are a bit different. There are just four areas: analytical quality, recommendations, technique and summation. Analytical quality gets 40 marks out of 100. The evaluator should analyse the speech, identify the strengths and weaknesses, and present them clearly and logically. Recommendations get 30 marks. The evaluator should make specific recommendations to help the speaker improve next time. Technique gets 15 marks. In spite of all these recommendations, the speaker shouldn’t feel they’ve been mugged; instead, they should leave feeling positive, motivated and with a warm glow inside them. Finally, the summation gets 15 marks. The evaluator should finish with a concise, encouraging summary of their main points. Role of chief judge In the final part of this speech, I’d like to cover the role of the chief judge. As the chief judge, you’ve got 5 jobs: find people and material before the contest, carry out the judges’ briefings, supervise the vote-counting, deal with any protests and handle the announcement of the results. Before the contest, you have several people to find: judges, the tie-breaking judge, counters and timers. You need at least half-a-dozen judges: the more the better really, to average out people’s idiosyncrasies. Reasonably experienced if possible, ideally people who’ve come to this workshop. It can be useful to import a few judges from other clubs, and in later rounds, it’s important to get balanced representation from all the clubs taking
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part. The tie-breaking judge can be yourself, but it doesn’t have to be. Counters and timers can be inexperienced, but should be at least reasonably reliable. You also need to get lots of material before the contest. Forms for the judges, tiebreaking judge, counters and timers. These can be ordered from World Headquarters. You might like to think that some people in this room have bootleg copies which they’d be glad to photocopy for you: I couldn’t possibly comment. Certificates for 1 st, 2nd and 3rd places can also be ordered from HQ. And make sure you get a copy of the rules and bring it to the contest. Before the contest, you need to brief the judges, counters and timers, and hand over the appropriate forms to them. The judges’ briefing is basically what we’ve already covered: run through what they need to do, quickly summarise the judging criteria, and highlight things like: ignore timing, avoid bias and sign the form at the bottom. The counters’ briefing is straightforward: tell them how to add up the scores. Finally the timers’ briefing should be straightforward, but two points. First, the timing process is a bit different from a normal club meeting, so if the timers are new to the club, it’s worth holding their hand. Second, if it’s a Sunday morning at a District conference, you may want to check your timers for hangovers: any mistakes in timing are very obvious. At the end of the contest, it’s best if you collect the forms from the timers and the tiebreaking judge, and let the counters collect them from all the other judges. Make sure you’ve got all the voting slips, and leave the room for somewhere quiet. Lean over the counters shoulders while they add up the scores: 3 points for every 1 st-placed contestant, 2 points for every 2nd place and 1 point for every 3rd. Make sure they’ve included all the judges, and make sure they check and double-check the results. At this point you get the timers’ form out of your pocket, and ceremonially disqualify any contestant whose speech was too long or too short. (Don’t forget to do this: it’s embarrassing if you do.) Finally, if there are any ties in the first three places, get out the tie-breaking judge’s form and resolve the problem: the place is given to the contestant placed higher by the tiebreaking judge, and no other places are affected. A word about protests. These are rare but important: someone claimed to me once that most American districts are in litigation over the results of speech contests. Fortunately we don’t do things like that over here. Protests can be made on two grounds. Eligibility: the contestant must be a paid-up member of a Toastmasters club. And originality: you can’t lift your speech from the pages of the Readers Digest. (Believe me, this has happened.) Protests can be made by contestants or judges only; they need to be made to the contest chairman or the chief judge, and they need to be made before the results are announced. In the case of a protest about eligibility, the contest chairman has the final decision. In the case of a protest about originality, the chief judge convenes a pow-wow of all the judges, and they reach a majority verdict. Finally, the results can be announced by the chief judge or the contest chairman. Fill in the certificates; say if there were any disqualifications due to timing, but don’t name the disqualified contestants; announce the first 3 places in reverse order; and join in the applause. Summary Fellow Toastmasters, I hope I’ve been able to help you understand what you have to do as a judge and as a chief judge. We’ve covered a lot of material, but I’ll be glad to take any questions in the interval. Madam Toastmaster.
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