Written by Kim Warren

Level 4, United Kingdom

The dust has started settling after the Modern Masters 2015 weekend, and judges are starting to have the time to focus on other things. With such a large proportion of the world’s judges having been involved in this weekend in one way or another, there will have been many opportunities for judges to shine, and this seems like a good time to open up the submissions window for the next wave of Exemplar.

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Updates on Wave 2

Firstly, though, some of you will no doubt be wondering what the situation is with the mailing associated with Exemplar Wave 2. This has also had to take a back seat to the Modern Masters 2015 weekend, so we have decided to open Wave 3 for submissions before the Wave 2 mailing has gone out. We are currently working on a way to email all judges recognised in Wave 2 a link to a form which will allow them to give us their current address details, which should allow us to avoid some of the mailing address problems that we encountered during Wave 1. I’ll post an update here when we have sent this email, so you don’t have to worry about not having received it before you see that post!

Exemplar Wave 3

We’ve looked at some of the patterns of submissions from the first two Exemplar waves (there should be a post with some numbers about this to come in the near future, because everyone loves data) and have taken on board some community suggestions in order to make some changes to recognition slot assignments in this wave.

We’ve received feedback that L2 judges did not feel like they had enough recognition slots. Additionally, we’ve realised that due to the very high proportion of the program which is level 1, there were probably not enough dedicated recognition slots for that level. As a result, we’ve decided to give each L2 judge a third recognition slot, dedicated to recognising L1 judges. At the other end of the level spectrum, we’ve received feedback that there seemed to be a very high number of recognition slots dedicated to Senior Judges, considering the relatively small number of judges in the Regional Coordinator and L4+ groups. As such, we’ve replaced those slots and any slots dedicated to recognising L3 judges with a number of L3+ judge slots instead. That means that the new recognitions slot assignments look like this:

Recognising Judge’s Level Max L1 Recognitions Max L2 Recognitions Max L3+ Recognitions Additional “any level” Recognitions Level 2 2 1 Level 3 3 2 2 1 Level 4 4 5 2 Level 5 4 6 2 RC Extra 6 6 1

These changes are already implemented in the JudgeApps interface, with the window set to open in a few hours time (1am GMT June 11th) – all that you need to worry about is entering your recognitions there. Before doing so, I would recommend that you take a look at Jack Doyle’s article where he highlights some examples of good recognitions from the previous waves, and also outlines some of the common pitfalls that people encountered in writing them. This provides some good advice for writing recognitions which meet the necessary criteria to be accepted.

The deadline for submissions for this wave with be August 31st at 23:59 GMT.

It’s been great to read over recognitions from the previous waves and to learn about the exemplary actions of judges of all levels around the world, and I’m looking forwards to learning more about the inspirational things that judges have been doing with this new wave!