Level Two - Lesson 29
Writing Reviews
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Hello there!
Welcome back to the level two lessons for the Star Wars™: Unlimited Judge Program!
As always, I’m your host Jonah, and this lesson is going to cover the practice of writing reviews. Reviews are a form of written feedback that are private between the author and subject, but can form a critical part of long term judge development.
Feedback is, as I’ve mentioned frequently, important to the long term health of the judge program - we can’t get better if we don’t help each other improve. That’s what these lessons are, and the broadcasts, and the many channels in the Discord - they’re all ways to help the community grow.
However, those channels aren’t personal and specific, and you can only learn so much from generic resources.
What Are Reviews
Because reviews are recorded feedback, they have a weight and history to them that other formats of feedback don’t have. As a quick aside, I’m going to refer to reviews as written documents, but you could provide a voice recording, as an equally effective review - however Nexus currently doesn’t have the tech to support that.
By being something that both the author and subject can revisit, it allows for better long term development. If a judge walks you through a specific process that they found helped them learn more from investigations - that’s incredibly helpful. If they wrote it down and sent it you, you can refer to it whenever you want, without having to bug the person who first told you about the idea.
Furthermore, as a mentor or as someone who wants to learn and grow, you can look back at the reviews you’ve received or the reviews of a candidate to see how they’ve grown. We’ve all had the experience of asking a player who started with the initiative this round, and neither of them can remember... do you really expect that you’ll remember exactly your evaluation of either a candidate or even yourself months after the fact?
It can be very easy to feel stagnant as you’re reaching into new territory, because you’re not seeing momentous growth - so you’re not seeing any growth. But if you track your progress through reviews - either ones you write about yourself or about other people - you’ll be able to see definite changes.
Evaluations don’t go on your permanent record, and aren’t accessible to anyone without them being directly shared by the author or subject. Tournament Organizers and other judges do not have access to reviews written by or about you, unless they are explicitly shared.
Reviews for Level Twos
So what makes reviews important for level two judges in particular? Well, beyond the fact that L2 judges with the Mentorship certification can endorse L1 candidates, L2 judges are going to begin to interact with more and more judges outside of their local store.
Furthermore, L2 judges already make up a small portion of the judge program - and so you start to become a focus of authority - being able to provide well reasoned feedback to judges you work with, or even to tournament organizers, is of huge benefit.
What Makes A Review?
A review is any recorded feedback. Right now, on Nexus, we have two types of reviews - Evaluations and Endorsements.
Endorsements are used for the advancement process - an L1 endorsement is a prerequisite for the L1 exam. The L2 endorsement is a prerequisite for the L2 exam.
Evaluations are, well... everything else. If someone has asked you for an endorsement, but you don’t quite think they’re ready, you can submit an evaluation. Did you work with someone who taught you a lot? You can write them an evaluation. Do you think someone is close to excellence, but they have a few areas of improvement? Write an evaluation!
As a quick aside, there’s another type of review that I want to deploy, but I don’t have a timeline for it. Accolades are short reviews (maybe 50 words or less) intended to be strictly praise and celebration of each other. If the subject approves an accolade, it will publicly be displayed on Nexus.
Let’s talk about some common review structures - three-part reviews, focused reviews, self-reviews and aspect-based reviews.
Three-Part Reviews
Three-part reviews are a classic review format and one that you may have seen in other evaluation procedures.
The first part is strengths, or areas where the subject performs exceptionally well. The second part is areas of improvement, and the final section is tying things together, or any comments.
This structure is generally recommended to folks writing their first reviews, because the premise of including each of these elements is helpful in writing a review that is useful.
If your evaluation is strictly negative or strictly positive, it can come off as unwelcoming or insincere, and consequently be disregarded. Then, tying it together with analysis ensures that you put some critical thinking into it - perhaps suggesting routes to improve in the areas of weakness, or ways to elevate a good skill even higher.
On the other hand, slavishly following the structure when you don’t have something critical to say (or something positive) can make the feedback feel forced.
Focused Reviews
Focused Reviews do what they say on the tin - they take a particular interaction, skill, or moment, and really focus in on that. I’ve written focused reviews on some things, such as a life total discrepancy that took a long time to resolve and ended up writing several pages on the one judge call, because it was documenting the investigation steps I and the other judge took, where we mis-stepped and could have gotten information more efficiently, and some thoughts I had after the call about other ways we could have improved the player experience.
I’ve also written a paragraph on how to make better tape loops to help hold up pairings, and why that’s important from a logistical perspective and the impact is has on the perception of the event.
Focused reviews often tend to be a bit shorter (despite the nature of my examples), and aren’t necessarily positive or negative, but explore a specific moment or behavior.
These can be a great way to get into writing reviews, as it doesn’t need to feel like a broad evaluation of a person, but instead “The way you handled that call was very impressive - here’s why...”
Aspect-Based Reviews
Aspect-Based reviews are yet again another well-named structure. Rather than focusing on strengths or weaknesses, or a specific call, an aspect-based review selects one or more aspects of a judge, and evaluates those - strengths and weaknesses and how they intertwine.
This could be evaluating a judge on their skill with the rules - highlighting that they really understand nested abilities and modified actions and are exceptionally good at explaining them, but seem to have not been up to date with the recent set releases, and struggled with the new mechanics.
Self-Reviews
Self-reviews aren’t so much a structure as a subject - they can be composed in any way, but are an evaluation of self. Notably self-reviews don’t have to be only your perspective and opinion - you can ask your mentors and peers for their input, and mix their ingredients together to create your final analysis of yourself.
Self-reviews are a great tool to benchmark yourself in two key ways. First is the obvious. You can write down in May that you feel like investigations are a weak point, and some strategies you’re going to follow in order to improve, and then in October read that review and see how much stronger you are.
The other is in reading positive self-reviews, where you feel like you’re incredible at a certain task or aspect... and then checking in six months or a few years later and realizing how much you’ve grown since then, and that maybe you weren’t as perfect as you thought you were, because you’re perfect now.
What are the Aspects?
I’ve mentioned several times the aspects of judging, but haven’t really talked about them. A full exploration of the Aspects of a judge will be available on Nexus, along with a breakdown of general expectations by level.
Aspects are the different parts of being a judge - some are obvious: rules knowledge, policy knowledge, game knowledge.
Some take being a judge or having an interest in event management to realize are important: scorekeeping and logistics.
And others maybe don’t make as much sense immediately: stress management, conflict management, policy philosophy, self-evaluation, program construction, mentorship...
All of these aspects show up in every judge, just in different quantities. When the aspects are explained and broken down into their contingent parts, it becomes a lot easier to write good evaluation.
It can be hard to explain why someone is a good judge or why their behavior feels incorrect from a holistic perspective. But when you have a list of various aspects, you can say “Oh, that judge has an incredible in-person aura that exudes authority - their leadership and presence are very good!” or maybe you’ll recognize “this person’s self-evaluation is poor - their understanding of their skill doesn’t line up with external perception, which is why they react so defensively when they don’t get glowing feedback.”
Furthermore, having these aspects laid out allows you to more comfortably and confidently evaluate yourself - you can see where you are, and what the expectations are of the next level. It also allows you to focus on smaller steps. Rather than trying to level up every stat at the same time, you can focus on one area before moving to the next.
Risks of Reviews
Now, I’ve spent the majority of this lesson giving you guidance on how to write reviews, telling you the structure, and how to approach them. However, reviews do come with some risks.
First, they can be asynchronous, and therefore feel a little bit more impersonal. If you write and send a review, and that’s the whole of your interaction, the subject might feel a little off guard - they weren’t expecting to wake up with an email notification telling them that someone was critical of them, and then not be able to talk it over.
To mitigate this, there are two best practices - first, let someone know that you’re writing them a review. I recommend letting them know when you’re close to done, rather than immediately, because then you might not actually get around to writing the review in a timely manner. On the other hand, maybe them knowing and bugging you about it is good motivation - to each their own!! The other practice is to make sure you invite them to approach you with questions and comments. They may want to better understand something you were trying to explain, or may have a perspective on an action that they took.
Second, it can be very easy to be disingenuous or not yourself in a review. If you’re striving to hit both positive and negative elements, you may push the truth of your perception a little bit, just to make it stick a little bit more. You may also be harsher or more direct than you usually behave.
This is because, even though we know we’re writing the review for a real person, there’s an amount of social and cultural conditioning that changes how people write on the internet, when their subject isn’t directly in front of them.
This can be mitigated by having a conversation with the subject - talk with them at the end of the event and go over your feedback in person, and take notes that you turn into a review. Or, if the end of the event is busy, talk with them online afterward and then turn that into a more permanent and searchable record by making it a review.
Of course, reviews also have all of the risks and challenges associated with other forms of feedback. Make sure that you genuinely care about the success of your subject, make sure that you respect them, and listen to their perspective, even if it’s different than yours.
And that just about wraps us up for the level two lessons. Next are a couple of electives - one covering the expectations around endorsements for both L1 and L2, and another detailing the path to Level Two. If you’re watching this on YouTube, and you want more level two lessons in your feed, go ahead and subscribe. Join us Tuesdays and Fridays on twitch.tv/swu_judges for live broadcasts covering the content of these lessons as they are released, and join the Star Wars: Unlimited Judge Program Discord to join the community in discussion of this and much, much more.
As always, good luck, and have fun.