Written by Bryan Prillaman

Level 3, United States, Florida

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, judges of all ages the Exemplar team proudly brings to you…

Wave 6!



We are hard at work reviewing Wave 5, but that’s no reason to delay the next wave from starting. Wave 6 is open as of right now with an end date in mid-summer.

Wave 6 ends on Aug 2nd at 23:59PM PST (GMT+7).

Before I talk about the slots and other changes, I want to tell one of my favorite “bad jokes”

Man walks into a pizza place and orders a pizza. The clerk behind the counter asks “Do you want me to cut that into 6 slices or 8?” The man thinks for a moment and says “Better cut it into 6 slices, I could never eat 8.”

Get it? Its funny because the size of the Pizza doesn’t actually change!

Now, back to Exemplar. With waves 5 and now wave 6, we have moved from three waves a year, to four. That invisibly increased the number of nominations a year by 33%. So what you are going to see below is the visible decrease in slots so that the total annual number of nominations is about the same. We effectively are cutting the total nomination “pizza” four ways now instead of three. Hope you are hungry!

Exemplar Wave 6 Slot allocations

Recognizing Judge’s Level L1 Nominations L2 Nominations L3 Nominations Additional “any level” Nominations Level 2 2 1 2 Level 3 3 2 1 3 RC Extra 4 4 1 GP HJ Extra 1 3 2

You will also notice there are no more slots for L4s and L5s and there is this weird row called “GP HJ”. This is a result of the the recent level redefinition. The advanced role of ‘GP Head Judge’ is joining ‘Regional Coordinator’ as roles that provide additional slots. Whereas RC additional slots are predominantly used for “in-region” judges, the additional slots GP HJs get are for….Grands Prix! (Yes, Grands Prix is the plural for Grand Prix. Yes, it sounds weird. Yes, I’m going to keep saying it.) I’ll go ahead and preempt the question of “What about Program Coordinators?” We are currently still working that out. However, there are only four of them, so there’s no point holding up the start of Wave 6 for a few random judges.

More Changes

One of the common pieces of feedback we get is that it takes too long between the end of the wave and when the nominations are published. While the review of the nominations doesn’t take a tremendous amount of time, contacting authors and refining problematic nominations does take a tremendous amount of time. So we are attempting something new starting with Wave 5, the wave we are currently reviewing. We are going to spend less time/resources on fixing problematic nominations. This means that waves will be released faster, but the consequence of that is that the number of declined nominations will go up.

We still plan on spending time to help authors whose nominations are “close” prior to the wave being published, but nominations that deviate too far from the published nomination guidelines will be declined and dropped from the Wave.

If you are a judge who had one or more nominations declined, you will get an email notifying you of the declined nomination(s), pointing you towards the nomination guidelines and informing you that you will receive one additional slot in the currently open wave. This slot is intended to give you an opportunity to revise the nomination and re-submit it, or use it on someone else. It will be an “Any” slot, so you don’t have to worry if the judge you nominated advances. Please note that this is only one additional slot, regardless of how many of your nominations were declined. We feel one additional slot is the correct number. It effectively gives you a “do-over”, if one of your nominations is off, but it also subtly encourages you to be more thoughtful in the next wave of nominations if more than one nomination was rejected.

If you have one or more nominations declined in a wave, you will receive an additional nomination slot in the following wave.

As we are still reviewing the nominations, the slot won’t be available immediately, but it will be in place at least a week before the end of the wave. Seeing when nominations are actually entered into the Judgeapps, a week is plenty of time. Hashtag Winkyface.

I’m actually really excited about this change, because it will speed up the publications of Waves. There are a lot of well written, impactful nominations in this wave, and I can’t wait for you to see them.

That’s all for now. Until next time, stay awesome.