[macbrews]

Always good to hear positive feedback! I'm a recently appointed Associate Exam Director and graded about 110 individual exams last year. It's a lot of work but it's rewarding. We do take it very seriously and try not to cheat anybody out of points. It's been fun seeing all the new judges over the past few years at competitions and advancing through the ranks! I judge around 17-18 competitions/year and it's been great seeing the number of National and higher judges increase by over 100%. It seems that nearly every table has a National or higher judge these days.

I think that depends on where you are judging since the BJCP tends to have very strong representation in certain areas and much weaker representation in others. In AZ, we only have 1 master and 6 national. Of those seven higher ranking judges, we might get 3-4 of them to show up on a good day. Two of them are pretty much retired from judging. Now when I've traveled to San Diego or even Denver to judge, it's a much different story.

Still need more certified and up judges.  At STL NHC 1st round comp, I had 5 entries with 11 total scoresheets.  Of the 11 scoresheets that were returned, one was graded by a certified and  one by a national judge.  The other 9 were graded by recognized and novice judges.