Teachers Guide: Judging the Contest

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Judging the classroom and school contests
The teacher can serve as the sole judge for a classroom contest. At the school finals, 3 judges should be sufficient—a group of teachers may serve as judges, or you may invite some community members to judge the contest. Appropriate judges might be local poets, actors, professors, arts reporters, politicians, or members of the school board. Judges should have some knowledge of poetry, although they need not be experts. In order to eliminate any appearance of conflict, judges should not judge recitations of their own poems.

We strongly recommend that you print the Evaluation Score Sheets before the school contest, and fill out the names of the participants and the titles of the poems they will recite. Send the students’ poems to the judges ahead of time, printed out, so they are familiar with them and can assign consistent difficulty scores. This will save time for the judges during the contest and will allow them to focus their full attention on the competitors.

Provide the judges with a schedule of how the contest will run. Send them a copy of the judge’s guide from the Poetry Out Loud website at poetryoutloud.org/teachers. Invite them to ask questions or schedule an orientation prior to the contest so all judges have consistent scoring advice. The Poetry Out Loud website has audio and video examples of outstanding recitations; judges are strongly encouraged to view these before the competition.

During the competition, separate the judges a bit from the rest of the audience so they are not distracted. Judges should refrain from interacting with the contestants and the audience until after the competition has ended. Judges should not convene to discuss their scores—they should rate recitations independently and then immediately pass their score sheets to a tabulator. This practice not only keeps the contest moving, but also ensures that judges are scoring independently, based on merit only, and are not introducing other considerations in finding a winner.

Warn judges that they will not be able to revisit scores after they turn them in. This is one reason it is very important to hold at least 2 rounds in each contest beyond the classroom level. Judges get an opportunity to see a student’s range and true place in the contest and can score accordingly.

Prompter
Even the most experienced actors can forget their lines. It is very helpful to have a teacher or student sit in front of the competitors with copies of the poems to read along with the recitations, ready to prompt a student who may get stuck on a line. Show the students where the prompter is sitting before the contest begins, so they know where to look if they get lost during their recitation. If a competitor is stuck for several seconds and looks to the prompter for help, the prompter may whisper the first words of the next line to get that student back on track.

Accuracy Judge
Assign a separate judge or a diligent student to serve as an accuracy judge. The accuracy judge should mark missed or incorrect words during the recitation. The teacher or lead judge should decide on a consistent point scale for evaluating accuracy.

If a student makes no mistakes and does not need help from the prompter, the accuracy addition should be the full 8 points. If he or she makes a couple of minor mistakes (i.e., “a” instead of “the”) or transposes a pair of words, the accuracy addition should be 7 of the full 8 points. If the student misses lines or stanzas, reverses the order of stanzas in the poem, etc., add fewer points for accuracy, depending on the severity of the errors. A student’s accuracy score should be docked 3 points for each use of the prompter.

Tie-Breaking
In the event of a tie, the contestant with the highest overall performance score should win; if that also results in a tie, then go to highest accuracy score.