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As soon as possible. Much of this is out of our (audition chairs) hands for the following reasons:

1) In general, a lot of work, communication, and coordination between the audition chairs, managers, and conductors goes into the selection and placement of students in the All-State ensembles ... it takes time.

2) The "cuts" are done by the group managers, and the group managers choose performers based upon the conductors' recommendations. If the conductors must be consulted, it is then out of the hands of the managers as well as the decision cannot be made until the conductors specify their needs.

3) The managers need to take the time to review individual scoresheets to be sure those who are asked to participate in each ensemble can handle the parts. For example, if a certain part calls for a solo it may be more appropriate to assign a player with a lower over-all score but with excellent marks in tone quality and musicality.

4) Percussion placement is particularly tricky. Individual scoresheets must be perused and individual scores in each percussion category examined and balanced with overall musicality to ensure proper placement. Occasionally sharing of percussionists between ensembles also needs to be negotiated, as some programmed pieces are particularly heavy or light on percussion.

5) Sometimes a piece that was programed for the concert suddenly becomes unavailable from the publisher for any one of a number of reasons. In this case, it is back to square one with the conductors to select a new piece.

6) It is always important to keep in mind that the people involved in this process also have full time jobs. On top of that, it seems that the people who step forward to do these tasks also tend to step forward for other "extras", not just at this level but at the district and community levels, and not just in music. Ask yourself the question: how much time could I put into this process during the holiday season? If your answer is "enough that I would have had it done by now" then your help next year would be greatly appreciated. Contact your District MMEA Board representative and offer your talents.

The Acceptance Form is an efficient way of taking care of a number of pieces of All-State Festival business at once. If you "make the cut", the Acceptance Form must be filled out and returned by the deadline to ensure you will have a place in the All-State Festival ensemble.

Parents and students need to understand that going to All-State is a great privilege, and therefore comes with great responsibility. Many students are very dissappointed to learn they were not accepted ... especially those missing the cut-off by a slim margin. For every student that accepts placement in an All-State Ensemble and then simply does not show up, there is a student sitting at home wishing they could have gone. It is so unfair to these other students that the MMEA Executive Board made the policy that "no-shows" will not be allowed to audition the following year. The Acceptance Form offers a chance for students to check their calendar, clear the dates, and make the decision to commit to the event or to back out gracefully. If a student declines a position in the All-State Ensemble by the acceptance deadline, they will still be allowed to audition the following year.

MMEA must gather emergency information for those students attending. Legally, MMEA must have the parent's home phone numbers and home address in the unlikely event that an emergency occurrs and authorities of any kind need to contact the parents. The medical information is to help MMEA ensure that there will be no accidental medical emergencies (e.g. allergic reactions) and gives MMEA the information it needs to deal with a medical emergency should one arise.

In the event students are housed in dorm rooms and may need to share a room with a student from another school, and to plan for meals and snacks that may be provided to the students at the festival, we need medical and allergy information as well as ages and genders. When you think about it, it's surprising how many names are cross-gender.

The MMEA executive board requires the parents, music teacher, and principal to be involved in the process, even if the student is over the age of 18. Therefore you are asked print out the Acceptance Form and collect these signatures before you will be fully accepted into the emsemble position you have been offered.

The MMEA executive board feels that this information is private between student and teacher. It is the teacher's privilege and responsibility to break the news, good or bad, about the student's scoring and acceptance status. Only registered music teachers are given a login ID and password to see results. If you are a music teacher for a high school that has auditioning students, please contact Larry Bean to obtain your username and password.

Although no system is completely foolproof, the server is set to automatically disable a user's log-in if the password is entered incorrectly 10 times in a row. When an account is disabled, there is virtually no way to access it until it is re-enabled at the server by the administrator. Passwords can be made of letters and numbers and are cAsE sEnSiTiVe. This means if a password is only one character long and someone tries to guess it or use an automated password-guesser program, they have about a 1 in 6 chance of correctly guessing the password (10 tries at to guess one of 26 lowercase letters, 26 uppercase letters, and 10 numbers) before it is locked out. A 2 character password drops the chance to about 1 in 400. The average 6 letter password has a chance of about 1 in 5-billion of being correctly guessed. Most of the security problems with usernames and passwords happen because someone tells others what the password is, types it while someone is watching their fingers, or writes it down in an obvious place such as a Post-It note on the side of the computer. Think of a good password, use it in private, keep it to yourself, and memorize it.

Be sure you're using the correct 'username' for your school ... not your own personal name.

The password is cAsE sEnSiTiVe. Check your "caps-lock" and/or "num-lock" keys to be sure they're set correctly, and be sure to use proper upper and lower case.

We have noticed some difficulty when PC users enter numbers with the key-pad. Try using the numbers in the row above the letters instead.

Try using the "Help, I can't remember my username and password" link. If your school's phone number and your current email address is correct in MY SCHOOL, your username and password will be emailed to you automatically in short order.

See FAQ Can people "hack in" to get at private information? You could be "locked out" because someone was trying to be cute and guess your password. You'll need to drop me a line, Larry Bean <LBean@u47.k12.me.us> and I'll check it out and re-enable your account if necessary.

Paper copies can be printed and mailed to you upon request, or you may print your own. Provide a self-addressed 9X12 manilla envelope to the Auditions Chair with ample return postage for the number of scoresheets and/or results sheets you want, and include payment of $1 per student for printing and processing, and it will be mailed to you as soon as all the requested information is available. Be sure to use real stamps. Mail meter marks (the red-inked postage symbols) are only good for the date stamped on them. If you feel you must print your scoresheets to paper, you'll have more success if you change your page setup to "landscape" (wide). If you wish to save paper, Macintosh OSX has a built-in "Print to PDF" feature and there's a free PDF printer called "Cute PDF" for Windows PC. This allows you to 'print' the scoresheets to a PDF (Adobe Acrobat Reader) file which you can then email to your students or put in their server folders. They can view or print as they choose. Some folks have also reported that certain combinations of system, browsers, and printers have trouble printing the scoring bullets, so if yours are missing try using a different browser (e.g. Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, Opera).

We don't know until we know, but as soon as we know the answer it will be posted at the MMEA website. Visit the "links" page from the main page here to jump to the MMEA site.

The fee is based on the cost of the music, conductors, facilities, meals, and other variables too numerous to list here. Many of these costs cannot even be estimated until early spring. Suffice it to say that the fee has averaged about $175 per student in the past, some years more and some years less.

A teacher wrote: My student, a soprano, received a combined score of 198, yet is not listed as accepted -- however, the cutoff score is given as both 198 and 202.5. Should she have been accepted? Or was the cutoff different depending on the room in which one auditioned.

The latter is correct - the judges in room A gave higher scores overall than the judges in room B.

The teacher continued: just Was she unfortunate enough to have auditioned in the room with a higher cut-off?

No. That would be making the assumption that if she had auditioned in Room B, the room B judges would have given her the exact same numeric score the room A judges did. It is reasonable to assume that different judges will judge differently, and some judges will score "easier" than others.
When the judges in room A heard an "average" singer (the 'mean', or 50% percentile), they scored it as a 190. In contrast, when the judges in room B heard an "average" singer, they scored it as a 180.5; almost 10 points lower.
The conclusion that can be drawn from this is that the judges in room B scored "tougher" than the judges in room A. The only way to compare scores between different judges is to statistically "standardize" their scores, adjusting each score so it fits on a scale of 0-100 with an average of 50. These are the percentile, or comparison, scores. In this specific instance we could see by looking at the percentile scores from the two soprano rooms that having taken the top 30 singers in each room resulted in a cutoff score of 86.2% in room A and 87.8% in room B. If one more soprano was accepted from room B (lowering the cutoff to 86.4%) and one less accepted from room A (raising the cutoff to 88%) the selections would actually have been less fair.
This student scored a 198 in room A, which was a 75.8% when standardized. Had she given the exact same perfomance in room B, those two judges would have scored it as a 191, which still would not have made the cut in that room.

Past results will no longer be posted because it is misleading to make any assumptions about comparing your current score with scores from the past. Every year, different numbers of students audition on each instrument. There is no fixed cutoff score. The judges assign scores on a relative basis depending on the other performances they hear during this round of auditions. Your total score only has meaning when compared to the total scores of other students auditioning on the same piece and instrument this year. If ten players are going to be chosen on your instrument for All-State this year, you will be accepted if you are one of the top ten ... regardless of exactly what your total score may be. Your scoresheets are made available to you at this point in time NOT to give an indication if will be selected for All-State, but rather so you can see how the judges assessed your relative strengths and weaknesses in the various aspects of the audition while the performance is still fresh in your mind. These scores and comments are an assessment of your ability to perform on your instrument under pressure. Look for what you did well, then look for what you can do to give an even better performance next time. Make a plan for improvement, stick with that plan, and become a better musician.

For each student, the two scores are combined and then the students are listed from high score to low score by instrument and provided to the group managers. The group managers select and assign students starting with the highest score and work down the list until all positions available for the festival are filled. Therefore, the cutoff score will vary from instrument to instrument and from year to year. The cutoff is actually a quantity cutoff, not a quality cutoff.

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