Should your tournament use Assign Appraisers from Offers?  If yes, how would you approach using the feature?


Should your tournament use Assign Appraisers from Offers?


Your tournament needs to use Register Your Teams to register teams for you to use this feature.  If you are using this website and require teams to provide potential appraisers, you have met the first requirement.  You can review the list of offers by selecting Tournaments=>appraisers, View Offers tab.


Do you have other appraiser offers that might not be in your View Offer list such as a recruited list of TC Head Appraisers?  If 50% of your offers are not on the list, you might want to first assign these appraisers either one at a time (more here) or create a spread sheet that you can import (more here).  Once you have processed those offers you might choose to use Assign Appraisers from Offers for the remainder.


How might you approach using this feature?


It is very common that the list of offers to appraise that is not complete. Frequently officials running the tournament selecting the challenge masters and head appraisers they will rely on.  They might come with significant others that also need assignments.  Create a spread sheet with these folks and import them (more here).


Use Misc Actions button to:

  • add affiliate experience
  • mark any child challenge conflicts
  • more here


Look over the list of offers that remain but have not been assigned (Assignment=none) and have experience (Experience=1..).  If you see people you know that will be good anchors for a room of appraisers, assign them using drag and drop where you want them.


Note: You can assign individual appraisers by dragging their offer to the intersection of the room and job in the Tournament Appraiser Counts table where you wish to place them.


After doing this round of assignments use Save to save your individual assignments (plus earlier imported head appraisers,...).  This will allow you to get back to this point if you need to.


The remaining offers you know less about.  At this point you could let Auto Assign do its thing.  

  • set Room=all and set Limit=2 (ie assign to all rooms with a max of 2 scoring appraisers + 1 prep)
  • set the Offer Filter to Assignments=none, remaining dropdowns to all, Last Name blank


Look at the results.  Did Auto Assign have difficulty finding an appraiser for certain rooms?

  • if yes, you could restore your saved appraisers and try targeting Auto Assign at the difficult rooms first
  • if no, you could increase Limit and assign more appraisers


You can continue this cycle of:

  1. saving the assignments you like
  2. adjusting Auto Assign to assign more appraisers
  3. look at the result to see if you rollback to #1 or do further assignments via #2.


Very likely you will reach a point where Auto Assign is no longer assigning further appraisers. This could be because you ran out of appraisers or that the preferences of the remaining offers don't reflect your needs.  At this point you are back to using drag and drop to assign individual offers.  Here are a few tips:

  • if you have a number of offers you can't use, take a look at the non column in the offer
    non stands for non-appraising.  These are folks that might help out in another capacity at your tournament.
  • if you have a person that wants a specific job in a specific challenge, take a look at who has that slot
    Can you take the person in that slot and exchange them for your difficult to place offer.
  • put remaining folks in somewhat appealing or neutral offer roles
    Sometimes you can't give all their first choice.
  • You can add more appraisers to a room than you might need
    IC typically needs a minimum of 3 appraisers but up to 5 works too.  Make the number of TC scoring appraisers higher too.  Technical and Engineering typically need more appraisers than the other challenges.