USEF Equitation and H/J Judging

[Madison]

@OverandOnward

A horse show is a lesson, for many of us. Why else would I go?

That may be what you want it to be, but that’s not actually what it is or is intended to be. The lessons are supposed to happen at home, the horse show is the test. It’s not the judge’s job to teach exhibitors what quality means, they are only there to rank the class in front of them, which is a snapshot in time. But, if someone who wants to learn sat and watched a hunter ring for a day, and made note of what pinned, you can actually learn because you should see trends emerge. The problem often is most people don’t get to see the whole class to make a relative comparison. As mentioned above, the indoors livestreams this fall are great opportunities for people to watch and see what wins too.

Your gripe with hunters appears to be that shows are not clinics. So if that’s what you want, then you are correct that hunter shows aren’t where you are going to get what you are looking for, because that’s not what it is designed to be. No matter how much you would like it to be, it’s not, and most people don’t expect it to be.

[Rubyroo]

@dags

You literally cherry-picked my post & completely neglected to opine on the fundamental concerns that lead us to wonder if there is possibly, maybe, just a suggestion! other or additional ways we could be doing things.

@dags

Two opposing factors here:

1. Costs are not going to decrease to a point that makes this sport accessible.
2. This sport desperately needs to be made more accessible if it is to survive as a middle class activity.

You listed several points in your post; I responded to the first part in my post. That’s not cherry-picking, that’s responding to the first point in your post.

I addressed the cost issue in another post and didn’t repeat myself. I also addressed accessibility in several of my posts and didn’t feel the need to repeat myself. The posts are here for everyone to see.

This is all very different than you attributing my reply to a point in one of your posts to a completely new point that wasn’t even in your original post that I replied to. But I think you know all this.

[CBoylen]

@Rel6

This whole thread was started over an article that acknowledge that hey, maybe we need to train judges better, which implies that yes, judges can be wrong.

And also an article discussing bad sportsmanship, and yet people are pretending like any kind of negative comment isn’t going to be met by dragging the judge over the social media coals, or posting a thousand pictures and video on this forum so 100 people can disagree with the judge’s opinion. Sure the judge is going to write “hangs legs” on a card you get to see. Right. It’s so much fun to be a judge anyway and pays so well, adding more opportunity for public criticism should really bring candidates out of the woodwork.

[vxf111]

I don’t think it would be so onerous to ask judges to simply assign a numerical score that is announced as the round is completed (like the way classics are often scored and announced). Anything more seems like asking way too much of the judges given what they are expected to juggle. And I don’t think that numerical score is REALLY all that helpful. You know if your round was in the 80s or the 60s. And whether one judge thinks it was an 82 or an 85 is really not helpful information. If a lot of people lay it down, an 82 could be out of the ribbons. If everyone is missing left and right, an 82 could be the winner. I just don’t see how that information would make a meaningful difference to competitors.

[Pennywell_Bay]

@CBoylen

. If you never get a blue ribbon, you might want to look elsewhere.

I know a lot of people who play at the high end of the game with mid 6 figure horses and will come home from WEF without a blue ribbon .

[CBoylen]

Yes, there are definitely scenarios where my statement was oversimplified. But I think my point is clear: if you aren’t winning and you don’t know why, that is a reflection on your trainer. The judge’s feedback is in your placing, not in their explanation for your placing.
Say you are second and the judge writes “slow”, as a notation for themselves why your 90 didn’t beat the slightly sparkier 92. Becky might go to her trainer and say “I should go faster!”. The trainer is going to look at her like she has three heads and say “remember Becky, I told you to tone it down because this is the course designer who sets everything short and your horse has a huge step. Did you want to be second or eat all the lines? You got a freaking 90”.
And Becky might get it, or she might go ask 2500 Facebook friends if her video looked slow. Half will tell her yes, and she should get a new trainer, and the other half will tell her “no, Joe Judge must need glasses”. Everyone loses here, including Becky, who had a nice horse and a nice trip and a working program and showed in front of a competent judge who placed the class correctly.

[emeraldcity]

Absolutely, there are ways in which this can improve in dressage- you certainly see some outliers in scoring, which can make it hard to compare a score from one show to another. I rode a test recently and scored in the 50s, which was admittedly NOT what I would have expected from my ride, and my friend who judges watched my video and ballpark scored it ~6pts higher. That said, I could still read her comments and see that they generally aligned with what I would have expected, and her overall comments helped me understand why the score might have been lower than I thought. You also certainly see some breed/color/type bias. On average though, law of large numbers and all that, it does work out pretty well, and is way more rewarding than just a placing with no other information attached to it. IMO.

FWIW, I also started out in (very local) hunters. I guess that methodology really did not stick for me

[ww3467]

@CBoylen

I hope literally everyone either reading or commenting on this thread is taking some time this week to watch the capital challenge live feed, preferably an entire class with a pen and piece of paper to try their hand at judging, with whatever method they prefer, and see where their eye is in comparison to the scores.

The WCHR Professional Challenge class going on now (USEF Network) has some interesting commentary by Patrick Rodes from a judge’s point of view.

[Peggy]

On feedback in dressage tests. When I did dressage I’d get back score sheets with very few comments; sometimes only on the collective marks plus one or two more. I think there’s now a rule that the judge has to provide a comment if the score is under a certain value??

So they weren’t always as helpful as you might think. It was helpful to see how some things were interpreted/scored and, if you repeatedly got a low score on a particular movement, you knew your homework.

I do jumpers now. If I ride well it’s possible for me to win or place in the top three, even at a high-end show. Even if someone else is sitting on a former 1.6-m horse that’s prepped well. It’s not all about the ribbons, but it’s nice to know that it’s at least possible to win.

[LazyA1]

When you come out of the ring, you go over in your head where your mistakes were. Then, your trainer suggests how to fix. The judge ranks the class. It is very hard work.

There is very little in hunters that the rider can’t feel. Perhaps some fine points of horse’s form over the fences or how it moves. But few of us are at the level where more matters than a nice rhythm and eight even jumps, and smooth changes. We can feel all of that.

[Mander]

@Peggy

I think there’s now a rule that the judge has to provide a comment if the score is under a certain value??

Anything scored a 6.5 or below must have a comment. Some judges won’t comment on anything 7+, some will. A judge I scribed for this past weekend flat out told me I could ignore any comments she made if it was a 7 or above… Fortunately it was all low level tests so I had plenty of time to write.

[hillary_again]

YES! I am. And yes, I love the scoring and having the score right as the horse exits.

Hey people: it’s not that hard to have numerical scores. Yup - the judge has to commit to their score - can’t wait till the end of the class and decide that X is the winner, for some odd reason. Right - math wins out. It’s not perfect. Lots of other sports do it.

And yes - it is the judge’s job to “judge” the best horse, that day, in that round. Period.

[MHM]

@vxf111

I don’t think it would be so onerous to ask judges to simply assign a numerical score that is announced as the round is completed (like the way classics are often scored and announced). Anything more seems like asking way too much of the judges given what they are expected to juggle.

I think I’ve explained this before on previous similar threads, but I will chime in again.

Most judges I know give every round a numerical score. That is not unusual.

The complication comes when you are trying to communicate those scores to the announcer throughout the course of the horse show all day long. Many announcers will handle two rings at once, and the judges and the announcer and the ingate people are often on the same radio channel for more than one ring.

So by the time the judge waits for the announcer to finish saying something in one of the two rings and then calls in the score, the next horse in the ring might be on his third jump by that time. So that is automatically going to distract the judge from keeping close track of the round in the ring, and pinning the class in the correct order.

And that is without any complications if somebody did not hear the score correctly, or the other ingate person was talking to the other judge on the same channel in the meantime, or the radio was being temperamental, etc., etc.

It’s not that the judge can’t come up with numerical scores all day long. It’s that the logistics of conveying them all day long can be a distraction from judging everybody else in the class. Especially when there are multiple cards open at the same time, which is extremely common these days.

[Madison]

@ww3467

The WCHR Professional Challenge class going on now (USEF Network) has some interesting commentary by Patrick Rodes from a judge’s point of view.

I was actually just coming back to this thread to say the same thing! The next round starts at 7:30 and will have commentary, and it is well worth watching, especially for everyone who wants the types of explanations @OverandOnward references, the commentary has been pretty detailed, including Patrick being asked how much he would deduct for certain mistakes, how he comes up with a score, etc . . .

[CBoylen]

For the most part, I like numerical scoring, and it’s pretty easy for me to follow since I spent most of my life showing at shows with numerical scoring.
I will say, from a judging perspective, I get that not everyone likes it. I learned to judge from an old school judge of the 80’s, one of the best at the time who judged the national repeatedly, etc. He would have hated the trend to open scoring. You get the ribbon you get. His opinion.
When I audited the judges clinics in FL they were split in opinions. Some people like it as a way to keep their card in order. Some hate rushing to score to get it to the announcer before the next horse. Some hate getting boxed in where you start placing with decimals or scoring higher or lower than the round intrinsically deserves to get them in the right order.
For the exhibitor I don’t think it’s that useful particularly now that we don’t often jog. You should know what range you are in before they announce it. The actual number in that range means fundamentally nothing unless it’s a damn 100. If it’s a good class you can score a 90 and be fifth. If it’s a truly terrible group the judge isn’t going to give a class full of 60’s unless they are sadistic, you are all getting at least 15 sympathy points. The score itself means nothing outside of the context of the class.

[MHM]

@CBoylen

For the exhibitor I don’t think it’s that useful particularly now that we don’t often jog.

I know, right? These days, unless you are showing at Capital Challenge or someplace similar, many people will just look at the website later to see if they got a ribbon.

[skydy]

Oh, that’s too bad. I get that times change, but that, to me is sad.

[CBoylen]

@hillary_again

Right - math wins out.

I’m not picking on you, but this rings wrong to me in the context of a hunter score. That may not be your intent, but it’s just the phrasing. It’s not like dressage. There is no math. The judge is still ranking every step of the way. This one gets an 80, that one goes ahead of it, 82, that one under it 78. Even the “set” deduction scores; rail down, 45, rail down/round better, 46, rail down/round worse 44.
I don’t claim to have any real understanding of dressage scoring, but I do know you can biff one thing and still score reasonably well, because math. It may not be correct to characterize that as continuing to earn your score after a mistake, but that’s how it seems in comparison to hunter scoring where the reverse is true.
You eff up, that’s pretty much it for your score unless you continue to majorly demolish it further. Rail down, you are getting a 45 or its near number no matter what you did before or after, unless you topped that off with a refusal or another rail down. Trotted a step in the turn, 55 whether you chipped all the jumps or had an otherwise flawless trip. Whatever you knock that score down to, even if we aren’t talking major mistakes, you don’t get to add to it afterwards. Come into the ring bracing on the martingale and walking quick tempo? You are starting with a 75. It can get worse, but it can’t get better.

[vxf111]

Fair enough but I feel like this logistical hurdle is one that could be overcome without too much difficulty. Judge writes down the numbers and it’s the show’s responsibility to communicate them. If not in real time then later. On the scoreboard or in the office even.

[SolarFlare]

@Rel6

This is what I want to know. The events I’ve been to, there are 2 or 3 dressage judges and the rings run for what would be considered a half day (or less) at a hunter show. Maybe thats not standard, which is what I’m curious about.

In Canada (and we generally follow along with US rules, so you’ve probably got something similar), the dressage judges at eventing competitions are limited to 60 tests a day. That’s one reason why you see 2 or 3 rings running for a shorter length of time than one that runs all day. You also need to account for light - you couldn’t run dressage until 5pm, then have time to run all that stadium and then XC with the appropriate breaks between each phase or the later divisions would be running in the dark.

For dressage competitions, we have a time limit for judges - I believe it is something like 10 hours on the show grounds and 8 hours of actual judging. Depending on what tests they are judging, you’re generally in that 60-test range (lower level tests in the 20x40 run faster than higher level tests).