Coordination Regulations

General

  • For email addresses, meeting rooms and further information, see the restricted Moodle area for the Jury.
  • For each of the four problems, there is one coordination team consisting of three Coordinators.
  • Scores for each student and problem will be agreed between the Coordinators of that problem and the Leaders of that student.
  • If no consensual agreement can be reached, see section “Conflict Resolution” below.
  • Everyone should aim to finish coordination before Wednesday, 2 September 2020, 12:00.

Preparation

  • Until Sunday, 30 August 2020, 23:59, Coordinators will look at all papers from one problem, while Leaders will look at all papers from their students.
  • Until Sunday, 30 August 2020, 23:59, Leaders will send suggested scores to coordination teams to help them prepare for the coordination. Reasons and details:
    • At the IMO and increasingly also at MEMO and EGMO it is a longstanding tradition that coordinators are instructed to ask Leaders about the scores they suggest before showing their own notes. (This by no way means that the students should not be awarded more points than requested if the coordinators actually found something of merit in a paper that the Leaders missed! Coordination is about finding fair scores for a student, not about negotiating as hard as possible.)
    • Since the video conference is an additional impediment — experience shows that it makes life harder to not be able to simply point at a piece of paper and say “here it is written”, the screen sharing takes extra time, … —, hopefully this can greatly help Coordinators to prepare for each meeting so that they already know what the discussion points will be.
    • Each marking scheme has various parts marked with different letters. The email to each coordination team should state which points you claim for which student. This could for example look like this:
      ABC-1: 4 points (A, c1, e1, e2)
      ABC-2: 8 points (full solution)
      ABC-3: 7 points (full solution, small calculation error on page 2)
      ABC-4: 1 point (A)
      ABC-5: 4-5 points (A, C, we hope we can give 1 partial point for E)
      ABC-6: 6 points (A, F, deduction d1)

Coordination

  • For three of the four problems, coordinations will take place in video conference rooms (based on BigBlueButton) following this Coordination Schedule:
  • For the remaining problem (where there were a lot of scheduling problems), Leaders and Coordinators will try to agree on a score by email. Only if that does not work, they will decide on a time for a video conference.
  • Any times and dates in the Coordination Schedule can be changed as long as Coordinators and Leaders can agree on a new time that is before Wednesday, 2 September 2020, 12:00.
  • To ensure confidentiality, video conference rooms will be set up in such a way that Coordinators explicitly have to let Leaders enter, so that nobody can accidentally drop in on an ongoing coordination.

Conflict Resolution

These are the steps for deciding on a score:

  • Leaders and Coordinators try to reach an agreement on the score.
  • If they cannot reach an agreement during one of the coordination time slots, they reschedule and use the last 5 minutes of the meeting to agree on a time for a follow-up meeting.
  • If no agreement can be found, they contact info@memo2020.memo-official.org and Birgit Vera Schmidt will try to mediate. (You are very welcome to use this option early and often, preferably *before* conflicts escalate on a high emotional level. Keep in mind that communication via phone conference is more susceptible to misunderstandings, and in case of doubt, do assume the best about the other person’s intentions.)
  • If there is still no consensus, then both sides present their views and suggested scores in the Final Jury Meeting, and the Jury votes.

Confirming scores

  • If scores have been agreed during a coordination, the Leaders are asked to send an email to the Coordinators of that problem after the coordination, saying something like this:
    I approve these scores we discussed:
    ABC-1: 4
    ABC-2: 3
    ABC-3: 8
    ABC-4: 8
    ABC-5: Jury decision
    ABC-6: 0
  • Coordinators will compare this with their notes before entering it in the database (or contradicting if that was not what was agreed).
  • Before scores are made public, each Leader will receive a PDF with the scores of their students as they are in the database, and is asked to sign it to confirm that they were uploaded correctly.

Progress tracking