[QUOTE=Night Flight;8308478]
The problem with applying the dressage system is that there is a large difference in how mistakes are penalized between the two disciplines.
In dressage, you can completely blow one movement and still win the class if you score well on the other movements and on most of your collective scores (for instance, your horse might spook and take off bucking instead of doing a lengthen across the diagonal, been there). Obviously your collective score for submission would come down as well but it will only affect your overall score slightly. Think of some grand prix horses who in the past haven’t even been able to perform their final halt and yet they can still win.
In hunterland, certain mistakes are supposed to take you out of the running entirely because trying to buck your rider off (not talking playing), hanging your front end dangerously over a jump, etc. are dangerous. The emphasis is on the round as a whole rather than on an average of various factors.
If the hunter can find seven good distances and then nearly flip itself over the eighth jump, by hunter standards that round should not place except in a very small class with very poor company. By dressage standards, if the rest of the round is very good then that eighth jump will just average everything out to a good round and that bucking problem or that hanging front end is just something to work on in the future.
It’s possible that there could be some way to use a scoring system with points broken down for various things, but it would take a lot of thinking to come up with something that rewards what a hunter is supposed to be. I can’t imagine that the shows would look forward to having a room full of people calculating and recording scores, either (dressage tests go every 6-8 minutes with frequent breaks during the day while hunter rounds are about 2 or 3 minutes non-stop, so there would be > three times as much paperwork in addition to requiring more runners to get the results out quickly).[/QUOTE]
It’s a difference, but it’s not necessarily a problem. You can still have events that are an automatic -60, like a stop, if you want. And the intent here is to change the judging, and the results.
Hunter judges already have a card so they are used to writing things down. Instead of an arc they can write ‘8’ with little loss of rhythm. We could eventually electronic systems so that the judge records the rounds on a tablet and scores are calculated immediately.
The idea is to consider the situation from scratch and really think out why each thing is done as it is, and what good and bad side effects there are of those elements.
There is no question that such changes do change the sport and the way the competitors approach it - figure skating provides an obvious example. But they had to do it because of the appearance of corruption that had been created, which judges manufacturing scores to achieve their desired rank.
