Calls for transparency on 2023 Calypso Monarch judging system

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There is no question that King Young Destroyer would have still won the crown
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The use of the wrong judging system during last year’s Calypso Monarch competition has caused some concern among members of the Festivals Commission and calypso’s governing body, Qualadli Kaiso Collaborative.

The National Festivals and Cultural Commission agreed in March last year to implement a “high-low” judging system for all competitions, rather than the ranking system previously used.

A high-low system is a method of evaluating or categorising items, individuals, or entities based on their relative quality, performance, or significance.

Used in gymnastics, dance, performing arts and figure skating, the idea is to remove extreme scores—both positive and negative—from the final calculation in order to give a fair assessment of a competitor’s actual performance.

However, on the night of the competition, the judges used a ranking system, which seemed to have skewed the final results.

A ranking system takes into consideration all of the scores, including any extremely low or extremely high scores received by a contestant to arrive at a final score.

According to the Qualadli Kaiso Collaborative, that system was deemed “inherently unfair and prone to giving results that may be perceived as biased”.

The inherent unfairness, they argued, was that competitors were scored based on points, but the winner was determined by rank.

In a letter to the commission last October, the Qualadli Kaiso Collaborative suggested that had the high-low system been used, the results for the runners-up would have been different.

They argued that under the ranking system King Young Destroyer emerged as winner, with King Zacari the first runner-up and King Fiah as second runner-up. But had the high-low system been used, the results would have seen King Young Destroyer still win the crown, but Ge’Eve would have been first runner-up, followed by King Kaseba.

President of the Collaborative, Eugene “Kaseba” Silcott, said that the body needed full transparency on the issue.

Silcott said he wasn’t asking for a change in results but rather a public acknowledgement of the discrepancy.

In the letter sent by their lawyers, the Collaborative said there “must be accountability and acknowledgement of this wrong as the first step forward to dealing with this calamity”.

The group is hoping that the Commission commits to using the high-low judging system in future.

A spokesperson for the Festivals Commission told Observer that she was gathering additional information before issuing an official response.

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