I admit it. I was a bit nervous as I paused before entering through the sliding glass doors of the Doubletree Hotel in Sacramento, the location of the 2006 state-level competition of History Day in California. I paused to reflect on my responsibilities as a judge and to reminisce about my own experiences as a state History Day entrant decades ago.
However, I paused just briefly because I held a heavy box filled with the over 40 student website entries I was responsible for judging. I went inside, accompanied by a streaming line of students, parents, and teachers who had traveled both near and far to be part of this year's History Day.
The Judges Room
Once inside, I made my way through the throng of people to the conference room for History Day judges. I had arrived early, so there were only about 10 people in the room (judges continued to trickle in and eventually numbered around 50 to 60). Judges were expected to arrive by 8 a.m. and then sit through an hour and a half overview about judging, based nearly entirely on the "Judges' Handbook" that we had all been sent in the mail.
If a judge had signed up for both days of judging (day one was junior division and day two was senior division), they were expected to sit through the same presentation twice. Luckily for me, the person doing the presentation (who was in charge of all of California's History Day) had a good sense of humor. With the addition of a bit of heckling from the crowd of judges, the entire presentation (both times) turned out to be very entertaining. Plus, we were all fed yummy muffins, sweet rolls, and fruits while we waited, so the morning passed quickly.
Although the presentation was instructive, part of the reason for its length was for those in charge to determine which judges had arrived and which had not. This allowed them to rearrange and assign the judges who were actually present to the various categories. A surprisingly large number of judges never showed up.
My Judging Assignment
At the end of the judges' orientation on the first day, the official judging assignments were handed out. My assignment was obvious - websites. Judges for the website and paper categories are pre-chosen so that they can be sent copies of the students' entries sometime during the week prior. Judges for these categories spend an incredibly large amount of time reading through the entries and judging them before the first day of History Day even begins. I had spent approximately 30 hours pre-judging the websites I had been given.
With the judging assignments handed out, we were then told the name of a conference room and the name of the lead judge for our category in case we had any problems. Before they left the judges' room, judges began to match themselves up with their fellow judges and then made their way to their various conference rooms. Judging panels for all the categories except websites consist of three judges; for websites, the panel consists of only two. (Websites have only two judges for the simple reason that they never have enough people volunteer to be website judges.)
It was at this point that I discovered I had a major problem. The person who was supposed to be my co-judge had not shown up. Website judges, since they were supposed to judge the entries in advance, are not easy to substitute on the day of the event. What was I to do? At first, I was told that I might have to spend the whole day judging by myself. This I did not want to do.
Luckily for me, an unsuspecting teacher volunteered to help and they quickly placed her with me, with only three minutes before the first interview was scheduled to begin. She helped me tremendously during the interviews, but it was a great disservice to her that she had not been able to preview the websites before the actual interviews.
The Website Category
The website category is a recent addition to History Day. Actually, it is so new that it is still not an official category for National History Day; although, there are plans to make it an official national category in two years. This means that the students who were selected this year as finalists for the website category did not continue on to be judged at National History Day.
Many of the rules for creating websites are similar to those for the other categories. Each website should contain the student's own work, confine itself to the word count (1200 student-generated words), be accompanied by an annotated bibliography, and include a process paper that outlines why the student chose the topic and how they did their research. Websites also needed to be entirely on a disk this year (rather than online), could not be larger than 50 MB, and all media needed to be shorter than 45 seconds long.
