Hello all,

After this very good year of L3 certification, it’s time to make some changes to prepare the future.

Logistics and Tournament Operations

Level 3 judges have always been touted as tournament experts. However, the only way this was ever checked formally was through the Team Lead Capability Check (formerly known as TL recommendation). While good logistical skills often come together with other skills we’re looking for at L3, this was never spelled out as a Quality. As running events effectively is at the core of judging, we decided to explicitly include this in the Qualities. L3 will therefore be more than ever a quality label for TOs who look for judges who can run tournaments efficiently. Please see Alfonso & Jared’s blog post about this Quality for more info.

Down to 10 Qualities

In order to accommodate this new Quality, I’ve made some changes to the others, which are more cosmetic than functional.

Attitude and Maturity is merged with Teamwork and Diplomacy. The replacing Quality is named Teamwork, Diplomacy and Maturity. Both center around being easy to work with so it made sense to group them. Mentorship is merged with Assessment of Other Judges. The replacing Quality is named Development of Other Judges. These are two facets of the same skillset. While it certainly happened that judges were mentoring others but didn’t make the leap to written feedback, and also (more rarely) that feedback didn’t contribute much to mentoring the recipient, I wanted to reinforce the link between the two and how important written feedback is to mentoring. The written exam is no longer a Quality. Does it mean you don’t have to pass it? No, it’s still mandatory to score 80% :). But as that’s a binary check and not graded on a scale of Deficiencies it made little sense to have as a Quality. Therefore, no functional change here.

So with this it makes a total of 10 Qualities. Now, 7 are required on L3 recommendations, instead of the previous 8 (out of 12).

Anything Else?

Team Lead Recommendation is renamed Team Lead Capability Check (or “TL check” if that’s too long for you), to make it clear that it’s not a recommendation. How it works doesn’t change.

The L3 Assessment Exam has been renamed to L3 Preliminary Exam. Also works the same.

Jared has some changes to announce about Supplemental Activities.

That’s it!

Thanks for reading.