LauraBF wrote:
Anonymous judges and rather anonymous organizers are pretty standard. I recently entered the Creative Loafing contest in which neither was revealed. Thus, the concept of anonymous judges doesn't bother me. Sometimes in professional and semi-professional contests, you find out who read your stories *after* the fact.
Well, as you all know, I'm NOT a writer, so this doesn't affect me directly and I won't be submitting any stories. And perhaps this is the way that writing contests work - I don't know.
But out in the "real" world, where these anonymous judges are reading a story submission, they don't know anything about the person who has submitted the story. I would guess that there is NEVER any personal connection between a judge and an entrant.
Here, however, the judges are all FOLCs. And from what I've seen on both message boards over the past four years of being involved on the periphery of this fandom - there are definite "schisms" and probably a lot of unresolved feelings out there.
Now, say Judge I were to recognize Story X submitted by Entrant 5 as something they had read 2 years ago. And Judge I has "issues" with Entrant 5. I realize there is a scoring sheet with specific criteria but, as Tank pointed out, the judging of
how the story fits these criteria is still somewhat subjective. Despite Judge I's attempts, he/she could still let some of his/her feelings about Entrant 5 seep into the judging. And even though it would only be one judge's score out of however many there are on the panel, it could still skew the final score.
This scenario presumably couldn't happen in a "real-life" writing contest. It would also be harder with submissions of brand-new stories only, although there is still a question of recognizing an author's "style".
So I would think that people's concerns are valid under these circumstances.
Kathy
