I was remembering that exact story! I think it was between two women masters; but I can’t recall the names either…
Of the cases appealed to the TD Certification Committee, many of them have TDs working over their certification limits and running into problems. Being out of their depth seems to be a contributing factor to not being able to handle problems.
Some people feel that a rule can be enforced only if there are consequences for every violation. Kind of like arguing in traffic court that since most people speeding are not ticketed (no squad car is around at the time) then nobody should be ticketed.
Programs may help catch all certification limit violations when they occur. That can trigger an office inquiry to find out what was going on. Some reasons are quite understandable - maybe the scheduled chief TD got sick just before the event or maybe the tournament had an unexpectedly large number of players.
You earlier mentioned clerical errors. There have been TDs that think the person submitting the rating report has to be listed as the chief TD even if somebody else was chief. Actually the TD submitting the report doesn’t even have to have been on site (in which case the submitting TD is best served by not even being listed as a TD working the event).
MSA doesn’t list the submitting TD, just the ones that count for experience credits (although having submitted an event online is now a requirement for Senior TD.) The submitting TD does show on the TD experience summary on TD/A.
The ones listed on MSA are:
Chief event TD
Assistant chief event TD
up to 2 Assistant event TDs (pairing or floor duties can be indicated)
Other TDs
Section Chief TD
Section Assistant Chief TD
up to 2 Section Assistant TDs (pairing or floor duties can be indicated)
This list was developed after MANY hours of discussions.
I was not making a request to list it in MSA. I was simply saying that some TDs think that the submitting TD has to be listed in one of those spots (sometimes erroneously thinking the submitting TD has to be listed as the chief TD).
TD/A’s list of a TD’s experience will list the tournaments the TD submitted on-line even if the TD is not in any of the entries above. In such cases the only type of TD work listed for the tournament for that TD will be that the TD submitted it online.
example
201902232242 GROVE Submitted Online 52
I’ve never taken a hard line on sanctions, but to completely ignore a rule leads to questions as to why the rule even exists.
Yes, there are good TDs and bad TDs, and a higher level of certification doesn’t guarantee greater competence.
I know many professionals: lawyers, doctors, CPAs, etc. They all have continuing education credits that they must meet in order to renew their certification.
Even massage therapists have continuing education requirements, a friend of ours who got her state certification a couple of years ago has been scrambling to come up with enough continuing education credits to renew her license.
But TD’s don’t have continuing education requirements, and I think that’s a mistake, because I’m quite sure that the rules that existed when I took the Senior exam in 1987 have changed a bit since then, and I wouldn’t guarantee that I know all the changes or even the important ones.
But as long time readers of the Forums should have already figured out, I think we don’t do enough to help TDs learn and relearn the rules. Personally I’d favor an online training environment similar to a Keller Plan course. But I’m the lone voice crying in the wilderness on that issue.
As many new TDs will attest, knowing how to submit an event online is a skill distinct from those required to make pairings or rulings on the floor. It’s also a requirement for taking the Senior exam. That’s why we show it on the TD/A experience form but not on MSA.
If I was organizing a large event with a hired TD staff, I’d want to make sure that either my chief TD or my back room chief had plenty of experience submitting events online.
I’ve never submitted an event online, but recently I found the resource the80-20td.com written by Tim Just. I’ve watched all the videos on using SwissSys to report an event and how to fix discrepancies / add memberships, etc. I think it’s a excellent website and it has helped me feel confident and prepare for my own events.
Not lone. viewtopic.php?p=329280#p329280
I have taken many a call from frustrated new tournament directors who are trying to submit events. The truth is I know the software due to countless prior errors, not any overall brilliance. A point I gladly make
to these frustrated TDs. And certainlly I agree with you in how vital it is to hire an experienced computer
td for decent size events.
It is my hope that at some point, revising the TD/Affiliate site will have some sort of priority to make this
task easier.
Rob Jones
The certification rules cite size limitations on being chief of a tournament or section of a tournament. Personally I'm only concerned about the overall chief being certified highly enough because a section chief's duties might be virtually the same regardless of the size of the section. For that matter, even in the more common case when the duties do increase with the size of the section it is common for the chief TD (the one responsible for everything) or the floor chief to keep a closer eye on an LTD section chief of a 200 player section. That additional oversight is a safeguard that the overall chief TD does not normally have.
Another thing that I'd like to see discussion on is whether or not the limits should be increased if there is a strong assistant (as in the case Mike cited). Having an floor TD mentoring a chief TD two more more levels below the floor TD (i.e, SrTD+ mentoring a CTD or ANTD+ mentoring an LTD) might be good enough even up to twice the normal limit for the chief TD while one level higher may be good for a 50% increase to the limit.
I’ve also heard from many TD (many of them fairly newly certified) about problems with submitting events. Most of them turn out to be data issues or not knowing what to do to fix an error or warning. The validation report contains a link to secure2.uschess.org/TD_Affil/whatnext.php, which gives a list of all the errors and warnings (and some of the alerts) and what to do about them. Most of the time the TD hasn’t looked at that list.
A common data error for Swiss events is putting in the result (W/L/D) without putting in the opponent number. A common data error for events being entered in RR format is putting in the opponent number, because for RR formatted events the column defines the opponent number, not the round number, so all that is needed is the result.
We do occasionally see problems with events getting messed up due to the number of fields in a web form. A 50 player 5 round event has to pass at least 300 data fields back and forth between your browser and the AWS server each time you hit the submit key, and that’s just for the crosstable portion of the event. (And nearly twice that if you’re reporting color information.) Sometimes web browser drop or mangle fields due to network issues or TDs hitting the ‘submit’ key multiple times or before a form is fully loaded. I’ve seen this on other websites with large numbers of fields in a form.
As I’ve said more than a few times, send me an example of a repeatable error that isn’t caused by incorrect information, and we can try to fix it.
Redoing TD/A is probably not going to be very high on the list for the newly selected developers. When they do get to it, I hope the first thing they do is define a new upload format. But that means either supporting both the current formats and all their problems and limitations plus a more modern format or causing all of our TDs to have to upgrade their pairing programs because we no longer accept the 3 DBF files.
One thing that is not easy to fix/prevent is the error that occurs the first time an event is validated due to not having filled in the ‘TLA Reference’ field. But we don’t want to pre-fill that field as ‘NO TLA’ because then people wouldn’t report the information we’re asking for, and we can’t offer a pulldown list of possible TLAs until we know the event ending date and the affiliate ID, otherwise we’d have a pulldown list with hundreds of entries in it, one for every recent TLA.
As I recall, the player limits are increased 10% if a TD uses a pairing program, which is nearly always the case for events submitted online.
Having an assistant chief TD with higher certification increase the limits would be relatively easy to check during validation. Beyond that, we’re back to my mantra: Define rules that can be unambiguously implemented.
Why not have a field on the upload page to check for TLA? That way when it clears the uploaded files as good it would also pass on whether or not there had been a TLA. If no then there is no error. If yes then the programming asks for the proper information.
If it was totally up to me I’d like us to collect more information about whether an event had a print TLA, an online TLA or both, plus whether it was promoted in other ways, such as the club/affiliate’s website, a state website, a flyer mailing, an email blast, etc. (Ideally this would tie in with revisiting the TLA concept and other forms of advance publicity through US Chess, in many ways it hasn’t changed since the 50’s, and these days less than half of our members receive a print magazine.)
I’ve lost count of the number of times people have asked for data breaking events down based on how they were promoted to see if that has any correlation to turnout. (Organizers ask for it, Delegates and EB members ask for it, staff ask for it.) But if you don’t collect the data, you don’t have it when people ask about it.
Thanks for the pat on the back.
There’s nothing wrong with requiring this field to be filled in. No response to start with is perfectly valid. The problem is the initial email that gets sent to the affiliate. It says there were “errors” in the submission. If it just said something like “an event is being submitted for this affiliate” or some such, we’d be fine. The reality is that there aren’t any errors. It’s just incomplete as we’ve only just started the process.
I continually get questions wondering why there were errors and problems with the event. “Why did I get this error email?” It’s always the same response. There weren’t any real errors. This is normal. It’s benign, but looks really really odd.
I’m not sure the suggestion made yesterday quite works, I’d be concerned that TDs would select some inaccurate response like ‘NO TLA’ when uploading an event just to avoid getting the error message, and we would be losing useful information about which non-GP events had TLAs. (GP events must have a print TLA, so the other choices are moot.)
As noted upthread, until we know the affiliate and the event date, we can’t offer a short list of possible events with a TLA to select from. Even knowing what affiliates the submitting TD is authorized to submit events for might not narrow down the list of possible TLAs to something manageable. (If you’ve ever seen a pulldown list with several hundred entries in it, you’ll know why this is something to avoid in form design.)
I have, however, changed this from an error to a warning, and revised the message that describes what to do about it in the ‘whatnext’ document, as it was missing one option.