Registration opens this week for our judging standards webinar, running live on September 18. It's free, it's an hour, and it fills up faster than you'd expect for something with no room service and no cheese in hand. If you've been meaning to get more involved with competition judging — or you just want to understand why your entry scored the way it did last spring — this is the session to put on the calendar.
We run this webinar every year for a simple reason: judging panels only stay useful if everyone on them is applying the same standard. A panel that scores a washed-rind wheel on aroma alone one year and on paste texture the next isn't giving entrants a fair read, and it isn't giving buyers a reliable signal either. This year's competitions nationally have leaned into larger, more experienced judging pools — one well-known contest this year drew nearly sixty judges across twenty states to work through well over two thousand entries — and that only works if the panel has shared vocabulary going in.
What the session actually covers
The webinar walks through how our Awards & Competition Committee trains judges: how to separate a "character trait" from a genuine defect, how scoring sheets translate a tasting impression into a number another judge can compare, and how team leads keep a panel calibrated across a long day of samples. None of it requires you to already hold Competition Judge Accreditation. A fair number of attendees are members who've never judged anything and just want to enter competitions with a clearer sense of what the panel is actually looking for.
That's worth saying plainly: understanding how judging works makes you a better entrant, not just a better potential judge. If you've ever gotten a scoresheet back and wondered why a cheese you were proud of landed in the middle of the pack, this session explains the mechanics behind that number far better than a single sheet of comments can.
We'll also spend a few minutes on what's changed in our own standards since last year — mostly small calibration adjustments, nothing that should surprise a returning judge, but worth hearing directly rather than picking up secondhand. And we'll preview the categories for next year's competition cycle, which is the point in the year when members start asking us what's new.
Getting in the room
The webinar is virtual and unpaid, so there's no reason not to register even if you're on the fence. Seats aren't capped in the way an in-person workshop's are, but we do close registration a few days out to give ourselves time to send materials, so don't wait until the week of. If you're already working toward Competition Judge Accreditation, this session counts as one of the touchpoints we look for on that path — talk to the Awards & Competition Committee if you're not sure where you stand.
However you're using your evenings this September, we think an hour spent understanding how a panel actually reaches a score is time well spent, whether you're aiming for the judging table or just want your next entry to land where it should.
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.