A single judge, or set of instructions, I feel like can easily start to sway a panel to the harsher side. When you have a region secretary say, 'You have five ratings, and you can use them ALL' for instance? I know sometimes there will be a voice in the room griping before a contest about how they were just at one, and there were too many ones given... Or sometimes if there's one experienced judge that's low, the other younger ones may feel like they're being too nice and come down to try and match. That tends to result in a lot of rainbows if that's the dynamic.

With the new system having judges select the correct descriptor for each part of the rubric, there's also potential to sway people to be more rubric-focused and less on just a feeling?

We've seen it in our region where one contest is the only one that's not Santa Claus, and is the blood bath instead. I suspect people are also finding their way back from being gracious with COVID. You also have a number of judges out there who retired before COVID and didn't look kindly at anyone giving excuses either.