2015 UIL 5A State Marching Band Contest

[Xenon]

  On 9/30/2015 at 5:32 PM, natertater21000 said:

Just another example of why I believe the UIL judging system to be out dated and not nearly as comprehensive as the BOA scoring process. There are so many problems with it, chiefly in this example that UIL can't show just how much a band beat another band in a caption. Cedar Park won music by .2 and Leander won visual by .25 and with a tie in GE that equals a Leander win, even if only slightly. However as shown UIL can't be that comprehensive in over all scoring and the fact that UIL sticks to this judging system is confusing to me, but that's just my two cents.

 

  On 9/30/2015 at 6:58 PM, DataGeek said:

One thing that's really interesting is the impact of a single judge in the UIL vrs BOA scoring.

 

In this contest, direct comparison of Leander, CP and Vandy scoring by judge had 5 judges place CP 1 in their category - 2 placed Leander 1st and 1 had Vandegrift 1st...

 

The total of the scores netted a .05 gap between Leander and CP - the biggest spread was a ,8 gap on Visual Performance Individual...  so that judge's gap mitigated the 5 to 2 judge preference to CP..

While the Rank method does remove a judge's ability to gap scores to show the amount of difference between bands, part of the idea behind Ranking is that judges tend to not be good/consistent with their gaps (sometimes within themselves, but definitely between eachother).

 

Just as you can't compare scores between contests, you can't really easily compare gaps between judges at the same contest. And without multiple judges per caption, you can't even tell if the gaps were justified. In fact, if you look at the MGE judges at BOA contests (the only caption that has multiple judges), you will find that they are very often quite inconsistent with eachother not only on their ranks, but also with their gaps.

 

Also, gap usage differences between judges can allow one single judge to either entirely (or mostly) call or remove themselves from a contest. If Judges 1 and 2 use a 0.5 spread between the top-5 bands while Judge3 uses a 1.5 spread between them, then Judge3 has significantly more weight than Judges1-2 and essentially calls the contest.

 

The idea for using Ranking is to specifically remove these variances and to force each judge to have an exactly equal weight to what they are designed to have by the rules. The problem isn't that one judge has too much power in Rank systems, it is that a judge can't remove themselves from a contest when they can't truly distinguish between the bands significantly.

 

Ranking works really well when there are clear differences between the groups being judged or when the judges are really good at distinguishing, but raw score based systems can also sometimes produce somewhat more expected results by allowing a judge to essentially completely remove him/herself from judging (by giving essentially identical scores) when he/she cannot really judge the differences between the groups.

 

Neither system is entirely right. Neither system is entirely wrong. They are just different and shine in different circumstances.

 

Most of the time, the results will turn out almost exactly the same (with just a few small swaps), but when they don't turn out the same, most of the time one of them seems to be clearly more correct than the other. I have seen it both ways; sometimes scores were more what I expected and sometimes ranks were closer.

 

Edit: The method that I have seen that seems to get things almost universally more agreeably "right" is Ranking but with removing one judge from each caption that is the most "off" from the other judges for that band. This removes the ability for one judge to tank a band by being just flat out "wrong" compared to the other judges in their caption. The big downside to this method, though, is that you need a minimum of 3 judges per caption. For UIL, this would mean increasing from a 5 judge panel to a 7 judge panel (not too big of a deal). For BOA, this would require a complete re-working of their captioning system.

[HighSchoolBandNerd212]

  On 9/30/2015 at 9:20 PM, Xenon said:

In fact, if you look at the VGE judges at BOA contests (the only caption that has multiple judges), you will find that they are very often quite inconsistent with eachother not only on their ranks, but also with their gaps.

 

I thought it was the music general effect caption that had multiple judges...

[Xenon]

  On 10/1/2015 at 12:15 AM, HighSchoolBandNerd212 said:

I thought it was the music general effect caption that had multiple judges...

Sorry, you are correct. I fixed my post.

[frenchhornguy]

Now that friendswood and dawson bump up to 6a, it really leaves Area F with no good bands, but if they advance four bands like they did 2013, my predictions for the bands are Barber Hills High School, Tomball Memorial High school, Caney Creek high school, and Lumberton high school.

[takigan]

  On 10/8/2015 at 1:52 AM, frenchhornguy said:

Now that friendswood and dawson bump up to 6a, it really leaves Area F with no good bands, but if they advance four bands like they did 2013, my predictions for the bands are Barber Hills High School, Tomball Memorial High school, Caney Creek high school, and Lumberton high school.

 

Crosby beat Tomball Memorial at Galena Park.  My vote is for Barbers Hill, Tomball Memorial, Crosby.  The 4th band really could be just about anybody.  Caney Creek or Lumberton is a pretty honest guess though. 

[hgpatx]

Unlike a lot of y'all who think there will be 4 from Area D, I think there will be 5, because there are 2 AISD schools that are starting to get better and might break into Area this year that previously didn't. Reagan HS in Austin got its 1st 1st division rating in 25 years last year and Ann Richards doesn't look terrible. Both weren't in the contest last time and there were 23 bands last time. If these predictions hold, there will be 25 bands who are in area this year, which means 5 go to state. Also McCallum is a huge dark horse this year, bigger than LBJ. But my safe picks are:

- Cedar Park

- Vandegrift

- Vista Ridge

- Leander

- Dripping Springs (if 5 go)

[That one drum major]

So I wanted to do an updated UIL scoring comparison after TMC to see how the things are comparing as of now.

 

It could be disputed that TMC is not the most consistent or trustworthy when it comes to judging but I have the day I'm quite impressed with the judging panel.

 

Visual:

Lee Carlson is easily one of the best judges a high school marching band competition could have for Visual performance with his over 10 years as a DCI judge and having judged BOA and GN 7 times.

 

Adam Sage is a choreographer and has worked with multiple bands including our current BOA grand champion, tarpon springs.

 

Kyle Miller is the chief judge for TCGC and also judges for MCGC and judged WGI for 14 years.

 

Music:

Nola Jones and Jay Kennedy are not known professionally for judging but are both quite experienced with college music ensembles and their scores should be quite accurate.

 

Percussion:

Max Mullinix was percussion director at Kennesaw mountain high during their multiple finalist placements at GN and got the percussion section to 4th place at WGI world championships.

 

Brian West is the director of percussion at TCU and they have come to be internationally recognized under his leadership.

 

Auxiliary (Guard):

Michael Townsend was a DCI guard member for 5 years and participated in the national tour of "Blast!"

 

They definitely have some merit to the judging panel and I think it is definitely accurate enough to compare to BOA judging. That being said here are the "ranking system results I got after going through the finals recap for all the 5A bands using the scores of Music Ind, Music Ens, Visual Ind, Vidual Ens, Music GE (twice to fit UIL grading criteria) and Visual GE. I did not take into account guard and percussion so take that as you will.

 

Leander 2 1 1 1 1 1 1

Cedar Park 1 2 3 2 2 2 2

Vandegrift 4 3 4 4 3 3 3

Vista Ridge 3 4 2 3 4 4 4

Lake Travis 5 5 6 5 5 6 5

Georgetown 6 6 5 6 6 5 6

 

Giving compiled scores of:

Leander 8

Cedar Park 14

Vandegrift 24

Vista Ridge 24

Lake Travis 37

Georgetown 40

 

I'm not exactly sure how tie breakers are determined by UIL. If it done like BOA where GE is the tie breaker then Vandegrift would win but if it is based off of who had the highest placement in a caption then Vista Ridge would win due to 2 place in the Visual Ind category. It could also be decided by dropping the "outlier score" which would make the final scores look a little like this:

 

leander 6

Cedar park 11

Vandegrift 20

Vista Ridge 22

Lake Travis 31

Georgetown 35

 

These make for some interesting results. Seeing the gap between Vandegrift and Cedar Park really doesn't surprise me too much as Cedar Park is quite good this year. Much cleaner and more difficult than I have seen a show from them in a while.

 

I am however surprised by the fact Leander was that far ahead and that Vista Ridge is so close the Vandegrift.

 

Leander barely slipped by at BOA SA but after finals at TMC it is obvious the addition of their closer has improved them a lot. They had almost a perfect sweep ranking system wise other that Music Ind which Cedar park never disappoints at. The thing I hope to see is some more GE from them. I'd expect no less than a full GE powerhouse of a show after last year but it has not happened yet. While it is exciting I'm hoping to see more still because it is not wrapped up quite the way I was expecting from leander after the big Rocky Point Holiday to Somewhere over the rainbow transition of last year. Maybe things will change through out the year but either Cedar Park will come inching closer and closer through cleaning their music to the point of near perfect like always, or Leander will find a way to pull ahead even further in pursuit of captions. Both UIL and BOA will be interesting between these two.

 

Vista Ridge has a musically and visually clean show but they lack a lot of GE and Vandegrift had been boosted greatly by their percussion section so when the gaps in GE are closed and percussion is no longer a factor (in it's own category at least) the two become very competitive for 3rd place. I'm interested to see how that will play out at state.

[Xenon]

  On 10/11/2015 at 6:16 PM, Chaseguy15 said:

Leander 2 1 1 1 1 1 1

Cedar Park 1 2 3 2 2 2 2

Vandegrift 4 3 4 4 3 3 3

Vista Ridge 3 4 2 3 4 4 4

Lake Travis 5 5 6 5 5 6 5

Georgetown 6 6 5 6 6 5 6

 

Giving compiled scores of:

Leander 8

Cedar Park 14

Vandegrift 24

Vista Ridge 24

Lake Travis 37

Georgetown 40

 

I'm not exactly sure how tie breakers are determined by UIL. If it done like BOA where GE is the tie breaker then Vandegrift would win but if it is based off of who had the highest placement in a caption then Vista Ridge would win due to 2 place in the Visual Ind category. It could also be decided by dropping the "outlier score" which would make the final scores look a little like this:

Ties are broken by making a new sub-contest of just the tied bands and re-ranking them.

 

Vandegrift 4 3 4 4 3 3 3

Vista Ridge 3 4 2 3 4 4 4

 

Becomes:

 

Vandegrift 2 1 2 2 1 1 1 = 10

Vista Ridge 1 2 1 1 2 2 2 = 11

[vincentlee1220]

For the record, Vista Ridge's percussion has been improving insanely over the last few years

They were just a point away from taking the caption at TMC

[takigan]

Locking.

All state-related posts go here: http://www.txbands.com/forums/index.php?/topic/6550-uil-texas-5a-state-marching-contest-predictions/