WRITTEN CONTENT

Endorsement: Brief text where someone says another person is ready to become level X.

Recommendation: Long text where someone says another person is ready to become level X AND describe that person’s relevant skills.

Review: Long text where someone describes another person’s skills and/or performance. Not connected to leveling up.

Advancement Review: It’s like a Review, but focused on a Panel or Practical evaluation and it must state if the candidate passes or fails the evaluation.

Self-Review: Long text where someone describes their own skills and/or performance. May or may not be connected to leveling up.

Annual Report: Brief text with the list of events done, role held and most significant things learned if any.

EVALUATION TOOLS

Practical evaluation: The assessment happens at a large or multi-day event where an evaluator and the candidate are both on staff. The evaluator observes the candidate’s proficiencies, leadership, and success at the event and writes a review, assessing the candidate. The evaluator provides the review to the panel lead. There is no pass or fail at a practical assessment. The assessing judge provides a report of the judge’s performance to someone else. 

Panel Interview (or just panel): The panel is a group interview where the panel asks questions of the candidate to assess them in each quality. The questions will vary, depending on the candidate’s known strengths and weaknesses. The panel lead must write a detailed review of the candidate after the panel.

Pre-panel interview: Long-form conversation about the candidate’s skills, knowledge, and opinions. Generally, the interview lead provides multiple open-ended questions for the candidate to respond to, and subsequently, the interviewer may ask for additional responses, pose additional questions, or ask for clarification. This is usually done via written responses to the interview questions, but the option to complete the interview via in-person chat or online interview is also available. The contents of the pre-panel interview, notes from the interviewer, and an evaluation from the interviewer are provided to the panel lead and panelists.

Interview: a talk with another judge acting as evaluator for the advancement to L2 and L3. Questions asked are based on the appropriate Level. The evaluator must write a brief review of the candidate after the interview.

WRITTEN TESTS

Exam: CR and/or Policy tests. They may be open/close-book; proctored/unproctored according to the definition.

Update Quizzes: Open internet, non-proctored, online test focused on the recent CR and Policy changes. 

Advanced Update Quizzes: Like Update Quizzes, but with more complex/advanced questions.

Refresh exam: Annual open internet, non-proctored, online test focused on that year’s CR and Policy changes.

Open Book Exam: It’s an Exam where the candidate has access to the Comprehensive Rules, the Infraction Procedure Guide, the Magic Tournament Rules and the Judging at Regular documents in digital form. No other documents can be accessed, including the FAQ in the release notes or gatherer. Open book exams are proctored and timed.

TEAM AND TASK LEADING

Team Leader: In order to consider a judge has lead a team, it must have at least one other judges in it (unless another number is specifically required). The team must remain reasonable estable on its members throughout the day (it’s ok if a few judges are sent to help somewhere else or if judges get added to the team; but is not valid if the judge is just in charge of the task and get’s occasionally the help of other judges to perform the task). The teams must be formed before the event, the event must contain at least one other team and a head judge. It’s expected from a team leader to reach out to their team members and head judge for preparation, perform the assigned task, do mentoring to team members, do team building and display leadership and management skills in the team during the entire day. It is not required any specific sponsorship, selection tier, payment rate or similar, just the fact that the judge performs the mentioned duties.

Task leading: Unlike Team Leading this does not require a estable team all day long, but just a group of judges who are assisting different task leaders during a Medium Competitive Event.
However, it still requires have been assigned with this task in the schedule before the event; pre-event communication with the Head Judge and other Floor Judges; do mentoring to the judges; and display leadership and management skills.

PEOPLE INVOLVED

Level X Testing Manager: The person responsible for coordinating the testing happening for that level.

Level X Panel Lead: A person qualified to lead panels for Level X. After each panel they lead, they must write a Review of the panel.

Exam Proctor: The person responsible for providing the exam, watching it, solving the candidate’s doubts, time the test, and submitting the results of the exam.

Practical Evaluator: It’s the person responsible for coordinating, assessing, and pass/fail a candidate in an Advancement Review for the practical half of the L4 evaluation.

EVENTS

Multi-day event: Multi-day events occur at the same location across multiple days, and typically feature multiple tournaments, scheduled events, on-demand events and open play. ; enumerating all of them would be impossible. Having a single main event, or an event that is played over multiple days is not a requirement. A local game store running an RCQ-qualifier weekend with one RCQ on each of Saturday and Sunday in their store does not qualify, unless that local game store incorporates additional elements seen at large events. It’s left up to the interviewing L4+ to verify this, but feel free to inquire about specific events that might be unclear.

Large competitive event: It is a Competitive or Professional REL event with at least 20 judges on staff. For the purposes of advancement and maintenance, Regional Championships count as large competitive events, even if they have fewer judges on staff.

Medium-sized events: It is a Competitive or Professional REL event with 129+ players and 5+ judges. [Edited on March 5, 2024. This used to be 250+ players and 8+ judges.]

Event: When the term event is used alone, with no quality, it refers to a full tournament, from its start to its end. Exeptionally, in multi-day events, where it is usual a judge moves from one event to another during the day, each day counts as ONE event, regardless of the number or full or partial events the judge has been part of. Note that muti-day, large competitive and medium competitive events have a quality and go by their own definition and do not count as one per day worked. 

COMMUNITY PROJECTS

IJP core projects: It  is any project that has been created or approved by the Program Leads. Any project aimed to provide value to the judge community can be sent for approval to the Program Leads. A list of the current IJP projects can be found here https://apps.magicjudges.org/projects/ filtering by the term “International Judge Program” in the Project Alignment field