Last call for the Judging Standards webinar

We flagged this webinar back in March as a save-the-date; this is the reminder that the date is now close. Judging Standards 2019 runs online on May 14, and registration is open through this week.

The session is aimed squarely at anyone judging, or thinking about judging, at a federation competition this year, but the Awards & Competition Committee designed it to be useful further out than that. It walks through how our judging rubric is scored category by category, where evaluators are asked to weight technical defects versus stylistic character, and — the part that generates the most questions every year — how ties and borderline entries get resolved when two judges land in different places on the same wheel.

This kind of formal, repeatable judge training is a fairly recent development across the wider cheese world, not something either judges or competitions could always count on. Historically a lot of judging expertise passed informally, one experienced evaluator mentoring a newer one at the table, which works but doesn't scale and doesn't leave much of a written record when that mentor moves on. It's part of why serious competitions elsewhere in the cheese world have moved toward splitting evaluation into distinct technical and aesthetic scoring roles rather than leaving it to a single judge's overall impression — a structure our own rubric borrows from. A documented rubric with a recorded walkthrough behind it is a small thing, but it means a judge trained this year and a judge trained three years from now are working from the same reference rather than three years of institutional drift.

Why it's worth an hour even if you're not judging this year

A fair number of members who've taken this session in past years weren't judges at all — they were producers who wanted to understand how their own entries were being read. Knowing that a slightly irregular eye formation reads differently in a washed-rind category than a lack of one does in a natural-rind category, for instance, changes how you think about which wheel you send in for competition versus which one you sell. That's not a secret held back from entrants; it's just not written out anywhere else in this much detail, and members have told us it's the single most useful hour of prep before submission season opens.

If you're pursuing Competition Judge Accreditation, this webinar counts toward the supervised-panel-adjacent hours that credential expects, though it doesn't substitute for the panel time itself — check with the Awards & Competition Committee if you're not sure where you stand on that requirement.

The practical details

The session runs live, with time at the end for questions, and a recording goes out afterward to everyone registered, so a scheduling conflict on the day itself isn't a reason to skip signing up. Registration is through the events page on the member portal; if you registered back when we first announced the date in March, you don't need to do anything else — you're set, and the calendar invite already has the login link.

We'll be back with a note after the session with anything that came up worth sharing more broadly, particularly if this year's rubric conversation surfaces a rule that needs a clearer written explanation before the summer competition cycle gets underway.

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