Registration opened this week for our Judging Standards webinar on October 15, and if you've been telling yourself you'll get to Competition Judge Accreditation "next cycle" for two cycles running, this is usually the session that actually moves people off that line.
The webinar isn't the whole credential. It's ninety minutes on how a scoresheet is built, what separates a technical fault from a stylistic one, and why two judges tasting the same wedge can land on different scores without either of them being wrong. That distinction trips up almost everyone the first time they sit on a panel — a wheel with a genuinely aged, slightly ammoniated rind reads as a flaw to someone trained on younger styles and as exactly right to someone who's judged a mature-format category before. The session spends real time on it, because it's the single most common source of disagreement we see on judging panels every year.
Why this matters beyond the competition floor
We hear from members every fall who assumed judge accreditation was only useful if you wanted to sit on our annual competition's panel, and that's the visible use of it, but it's not the only one. Several members who hold the credential tell us it changed how they run their own quality checks — a technical scoresheet trains you to separate "I don't personally like this" from "this has a defined defect," which turns out to be a useful habit at your own bench, not just someone else's. A cheesemonger working a specialty counter told us the credential changed how she talks to customers about a stinky or bloomy-rind wheel that isn't selling; she can now say precisely what's happening in the paste instead of reaching for a vague word like "strong."
The webinar is free and open to all members regardless of where you are in the credential pathway — you don't need prior coursework to sit in, though members who've already completed our Sensory Evaluation Certificate will recognize some of the framework. If you finish the webinar and want to keep going toward full accreditation, the next step is a supervised scoring session, typically scheduled in the months following, where you score alongside an accredited judge and compare notes directly.
What to do before October 15
If you plan to attend, register through the events page this week; virtual sessions like this one have filled before the date in past years, and we cap the room to keep the discussion sections useful rather than a lecture to a few hundred silent tiles. Bring a wheel from your own case if you can — the second half of the session walks through live scoring, and members who bring their own cheese get more out of the exercise than members watching someone else's sample.
If October doesn't work for your schedule, the webinar tends to repeat roughly once a year, and the recording is available afterward to members who registered but couldn't make the live session. Either way, if judging has been on your list, this is the low-friction way to find out whether it's actually for you before you commit to the fuller accreditation track.
Questions about the credential pathway or this specific session should go to our Awards & Competition Committee, which runs both the webinar and the accreditation track.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.