Inside the Center

Intro
Quick—What's the most important web site for anyone involved in Magic—player and judge alike? Here's a hint: most people don't know anything about it. OK, this isn't a particularly fair question, since if you already knew about it, it wouldn't qualify.

The answer is almost certainly the Wizards of the Coast Judge Center. Originally conceived as the DCI Exam center (from which it got its nickname, DCIX, which is still used), it was originally intended to be a place where judge certification exams could be dynamically generated to provide for comprehensive certification of judges. Today, however, it's grown to be much more than that and now serves as the web hub for just about everything related to being a judge, with some useful features for players and organizers as well.

Today, we're going to go over the basics of the site, what it has to offer, and how to find your way around. Even if you've visited before, you'll probably find something that you didn't know about. So, grab a drink, pop on over to http://judge.wizards.com/, and follow along on our tour...

Logging In
The first thing you'll see when you hit the site is the login page. You'll notice that there are actually two login boxes—though the site was originally created for DCI games, RPGA judging is now also covered by the same site (hence, "Wizards of the Coast Judge Center" rather than "DCI Judge Center"). The DCI portion is the part you're interested in.

If you've already got your DCI account activated online for checking your ratings and rankings (or for the excellent Magic Player Rewards program), you'll find conveniently that the same password applies to this site. If not, you'll need to activate your DCI account online with the password that you got with your DCI registration card before you can access the Judge Center.

Enter your DCI number into the field labeled "DCI Number", leave the RPGA box blank, type your password into the appropriate field, choose your language of choice, and Log In.

Options
Welcome to the DCIX Main Menu! From here, you'll see a number of different options based on your current judge status. Regardless of your status, on the right you'll see two blocks of links—one for announcements and one for articles. These are kept up to date with the latest articles from the judge site, as well as recent announcements that we think that you should know about. The main menu in the main section of the page, though, is the meat of the site. For Rules Advisors, uncertified judges, and players, these consist of the Site Guide, Memberships, Exams, Reviews, People, and Feedback. If you're certified, you'll note a couple of extra special links interspersed between these. We'll talk about those later.

The Site Guide and Memberships links are both pretty simple. The Site Guide takes you to a page with some information about how the site works, and is worth reading over once. The Membership link is just a convenient link to the personal information page which you're already familiar with if you've ever checked your ratings and rankings. Not much to say about either of these.

Exams
The Exams link is where things start to get interesting. Designed for use by the judges that create certification tests for judge candidates, the Exams section has now been fleshed out also to offer useful content for everyone, which is what we'll focus on here.

First, take a look along the top edge of the gray box that the text is in, and notice that there are three tabs, labeled "Instructions", "Create", and "Select". Most sections of the site are run by this tab-based interface and will have similarly labeled tabs enumerating the various things you might want to do in that section.

The instructions tab should be self-explanatory and is worth taking a few minutes to read. As they say, there are two types of tests that you'll be able to create here. One is a Practice test, which doesn't count officially for anything, but provides you with sample questions that you can use to see just how sharp you are with the rules and bone up on the style of questions that are used in DCIX. The other is a Rules Advisor test, which is an official test that serves as the first step into the DCI judging program. If you pass, you'll become a Magic Rules Advisor and get access to the Magic rules list where you can ask questions and hear about the latest updates in Magic rules. Be careful—this test counts, and if you don't pass, you can't take it for another two weeks, and then for each further time you fail, the waiting period doubles.

Once you've read the instructions and decided to take one of the tests, click on the Create tab to begin the process. Select Magic (or another exam type if you wish, though not all game types currently have practice and Rules Advisor exams available) and the your language of choice and click the Next button. Then choose the test you want to create—practice tests are split up into easy and hard so that you can tailor the exam based on how strong you feel your rules knowledge currently is—and finish creating the exam.

Once you've finished creating the exam, you'll note that you're now on a new, fourth tab, called View, with some random facts about the exam you just created and the option to take the exam. A couple of the facts are of particular relevance. First is the time limit. The tests are timed, and when your time is up, your answers to that point are automatically submitted. Thus, when you're ready to take the test, make sure that you've got that much time allocated and a stable network connection before you begin. Secondly, the size field tells you how many questions you are expected to answer in that time limit, so that you can ration your time appropriately. If you're not ready for the test right away, that's OK—you'll be able to come back later—so make sure that you only begin the exam when you're really ready.

A couple of test taking tips and guidelines, once you're ready to take the exam:

• Read the questions very carefully. Though there aren't meant to be word games and there aren't any trick questions, there are certainly details and nuances that are relevant and it's important that you understand exactly what's being asked.
• Make sure that you note when a question asks you for the single correct answer and when it asks you to mark all correct answers. In the latter case, as few as none and as many as all of the answers may be correct. In the heat of the moment, it's easy to miss this and then kick yourself when you realize that you didn't finish reading the choices in a multi-answer question because you thought you'd already found the single correct answer.
• Even if you think that you know the answer after reading a few of the answers, finish reading them all—you may find that you missed something or one of the answers may have jogged your memory.
• You're allowed to use outside notes (up to and including referencing the comprehensive rules and various tournament rule documents), but you may not discuss any of the questions on your test with any other person for any reason, during or after the test. We take this extremely seriously and there are penalties for violating this rule. An important subset of this rule is that you can't get outside assistance from other people during the exam.
• If you have issues with any of the questions or think there might be an error, submit feedback on the question and the DCIX staff will check out if there's something wrong.
• If you run into a technical glitch, submit feedback and we'll see what we can do. In some cases, if you were taking a rules advisor test and a site error causes your test to time out, we may be able to reset the waiting time so that you don't have to wait the full two (or more) weeks to try again.

When you're done and you've finished double checking your answers, submit your exam and check out your score. Hopefully you've passed the test, and if you were taking a Rules Advisor test, congratulations!

If you ever want to go back and check out an exam you've already taken to see the questions again and see what mistakes you made and why, your old exams are always available to you. The Select tab, which we skipped over before, is where you do this, and each of the exams you've taken will show up with a status of "Completed". Clicking on one of those tests will select it in the View tab and give you the option to view your results. Additionally, if you want to submit feedback on any of the questions on that exam, clicking on the question number will being the process of creating feedback on that question. See below for more details on feedback.

The Select tab also allows you to choose an exam that you haven't taken yet (labeled as "Ready"). This covers the case where you decided not to take the exam right away after you generated the test. Rather than trying to create a new instance, you should simply select that test on this tab and then take it when ready.

Bonus for Certified Judges: If you're a certified judge and you're coming close to your renewal date (a year from your certification date or last renewal), there's one more type of exam that you can generate that is relevant—the renewal exam. The renewal exam is the first part of the renewal process and tests that you've kept up to date with the latest rulings and that your rules knowledge is still up to snuff. When it comes time to renew, you'll need to generate, take, and pass a renewal exam, using the same process described above for Rules Advisor exams. Once you pass, keep track of the ID number of the text, which is listed on both the Select and View tabs. You'll need this to complete the renewal process later.

Reviews
If you've been following along with Feature Friday for a while, one of the things that we've talked about is how important it is to give and get feedback about judging, to ensure that you're constantly improving your skills and the skills of those around you. In addition to talking directly to other judges, one good way to do this is by submitting judge reviews of the judges that you work with at tournaments. Judge reviews are semi-formal written reviews that can be read by the person being reviewed as well as by the senior staff of the DCI. There are some notable advantages to these reviews vs. just talking informally with another judge; they persist and can be referred to long after the event, so you can always go back and look at the advice you've gotten from others, they serve as a longer-term chart of how your skills are developing, and they can help the DCI to keep track of how people are doing and enables them to provide long-term guidance, which is especially important for those who want to advance in levels.

Judge reviews are now handled through the Reviews section of DCIX. Entering that section, you'll see the familiar three tabs—Instructions, Create, and Select. Again, the first thing to do is to read through the instructions.

When somebody writes a review about you, you should get an e-mail notification letting you know that there's a review for you to read, assuming that you've put your e-mail address into your Personal Information Center profile (and if you haven't, you should). If you've ever gotten such a mail, the Select tab is where you should head. There, you'll be able to see any reviews that you've entered for other people, and more importantly, where you can read any reviews that have been entered about you. Once you select a review, it will open on the View tab and you can read through the details.

The Create tab comes into play when you want to create a new review for another judge. Choose that you wish to fill out an Evaluation and you'll be taken to an intimidating looking form that isn't nearly as bad as it looks. The basic details in the drop-down boxes are self-explanatory, but the meat of the review comes in the three open-ended text boxes below.

Some tips and guidelines about filling out reviews:

• Don't just write a review just for the sake of writing one. The whole point is to provide useful feedback to people, and that only happens if you have concrete thoughts to share. Ideally, any review entered should have some information to offer the person being reviewed.
• Write reviews frequently. This seems to fly in the face of the above, but the ultimate goal is to spend enough time thinking about the judges you work with and how they can improve that you always have useful feedback for them. It can be a little more work to enter a review into the system than it is just to talk to somebody, but keeping a written review really will be helpful to them six months in the future, when they can't remember what you had to say.
• The guidelines for entering strengths and areas for improvements emphasize that it's important to note how you observed the things that you did. Just to reiterate, this really is very important, as it takes an abstract set of labels that anyone could just randomly throw around and makes them concrete. This makes the feedback more personal, more understandable, and more actionable.
• Just as you should enter in reviews for anybody you talk to, you should also make sure that you talk to anybody that you review if at all possible. Anything that you're willing to write on the form should be something that you're willing to work with a judge about in person. Face-to-face discussion is good for immediate impact and for a good dialogue about improving as a judge, and the written review is good for long-term tracking and follow-up.

Bonus for Certified Judges: The Reviews center contains the second half of the renewal process for certified judges that need to renew their status. Once you've finished taking and passing the renewal exam from above, that ID number will enable you to create a renewal review. This is pretty much the same as creating an evaluation of another judge, but is instead a self-assessment of where you stand as a judge. Once you complete filling this out, the judge manager will verify your exam and your self-evaluation and approve your renewal.

People
The People center is the one most relevant to people who aren't judges. This section is a searchable database of all current judges and Rules Advisors. Once you find a judge that you want to get in contact with, it also provides a way to send judges a message. This can be useful for locating a judge from an event that you met that you'd like to talk to, or to find possible judges for an event that you'd like to run.

There are two primary ways to find judges through this tool:

• The Find tab is the easiest way to locate a specific person if you know their name. If you know their full name, typing it in and clicking View will bring them up in the View tab. If you only know part of their name, type that part and click Search to bring up a drop-down box of all matching names. Once you find the right judge, you can use the View button to view their profile.
• If you want to search for multiple judges that meet a criteria, you can do this on the Select tab. On the Select tab, the bottom of the page contains the filter interface used to create queries. The New Filter drop-down box gives a list of things that you can filter on, and once you choose one, other boxes will appear that let you choose what you want that value to be. This gives you the ability to create general or specific searches, and can be useful if you want to locate judges for a certain task. If you make a mistake with any of your filters, just click on Remove Filter and try again. A good example of a filtered result list is the list that you get if you click on "community" in the description of the People section on the main page, which filters the list down to judges in your same area.

Once you've located a specific judge, the page mostly consists of various data about them, including level, statistics on the reviews they've submitted and received, and events that they've participated in. The most useful features on the page, however, are the Evaluate button, which starts a review of that person for you, and the Send Message fields, which you can use to send a message to that judge.

One final bonus feature—if you browse through some of the senior judges, you'll note that most of them have pictures uploaded next to them. This is something that you can do for your profile as well, so that other people who search and find you can see what you look like. If you select your own profile, there is a link on the bottom that will allow you to upload an image to be shown next to your name.

Feedback
The feedback section is for submitting feedback specifically about the Judge Center, either about the content of an exam or about the site itself. By this point, you can probably guess how this section works. The Create tab is where you should start when you want to submit new feedback to the staff.

Some guidelines on this process:

• If your issue is about a question on an exam, and you didn't start the feedback by clicking on the question number while viewing that exam, then you should make sure that the name of the topic is the question number, preceded by a Q. For example, if you have a question about question number 502, then the topic should be Q502. For any other type of feedback, choose a short, but descriptive name for your topic. Choosing the appropriate category for your feedback can help it to get addressed more quickly.
• Write your feedback in as much detail as necessary for somebody to have a good idea of what you're trying to say, but aside from that, keep your message brief. This helps to get your feedback processed more quickly.
• If you're providing feedback about one of the answers in a question, make sure that you write out the full answer rather than just saying, "the first answer." This also speeds up the process of addressing feedback.

Once your feedback Is submitted, you can follow along with its progress by selecting it on the Select tab, which will show all of the feedback you've submitted. Viewing a particular item will show its current status as well as the comments from any of the staff that have addressed it so far. Sometimes, we'll need more information back from you, and the View tab on the feedback is where you can add this information and submit it back.

Additionally, if you have your e-mail address properly set up in the information center, you'll get e-mail from DCIX every time a piece of your feedback has a new comment on it, which is one more great reason to make sure your e-mail address is up to date.

Remember that, like the rest of the judge program, the DCIX staff is predominantly composed of volunteers. This means that things get addressed as staff has time available. While we try our best to make sure that things are handled expediently, there may be delays based on people's schedules, and you may need to be a little bit patient when waiting for answers.

Finally, note that only feedback about the Judge Center should be submitted here. For any other Magic, DCI, or Wizards of the Coast related feedback, use the Customer Service site instead.

For Certified Judges
If you're already a DCI certified judge, you'll find that your main page has several more items than the ones already described. If you've taken the time to understand the previous sections, though, you already have a good idea of how they work. Briefly, here are the highlights:

• Polls: From time to time, you may see that the articles and announcements sections on the main page have been replaced by a poll question. This is used occasionally to gather data about an issue that the DCI would like to know more about from the judges, or to conduct votes for things like the judging article of the year. Once you've submitted your answer to all current polls that you have access to, the articles and announcements will show up again.
• Investigations: Any time somebody is disqualified from a sanctioned tournament run at Competitive or Profession REL, an investigation needs to be filed with details and witness statements. This used to be done by faxing in any statements that you collected along with an investigation form to the DCI. This process has now been streamlined and is one of the sections of the Judge Center. This works just like feedback and reviews in terms of creating new investigations and selecting ones that you've already submitted. The details of what goes into the form are different, of course, but are well described in the instructions.
• Content: Once you're certified, you can help contribute to the body of questions that are used for exams. This is done by submitting your questions on the Content tab, using the familiar tabs. Think about the questions that you've seen in the exams you've already taken and you've got an idea of the type of content that we're looking for. The art of creating good content is quite tricky—you want to test a tangible point of the rules, the question, answers, and explanation should be both complete and concise, there need to be five plausible answers, your explanation needs to properly cite the relevant portions of the rules so that test takers can look up the details if they wish, and so on. All of these details are covered well in the instructions. All of that said, don't stress too much about trying to submit content. A team of people will review and edit your questions to make sure they're good and that they fit the site before approving them to appear on tests. As a bonus, submitted questions that make it onto tests can qualify you for various rewards, as a token of our appreciation for helping with the Judge Center.
• Translations: If your profile in the People section lists that you speak a language other than English fluently (you can languages in your profile, just like you would add a picture), then you'll be eligible to translate questions that you've seen the English versions of into the languages you're fluent in. The process behind this and the way that you get access to translatable content is a little beyond the scope of this article, but if you're interested in helping out in this way, submit feedback letting us know that you're interested and the Translations Manager will contact you and give you all the details that you'll need.

As always, if you have any questions or find yourself needing help on any of these sections of the site, submit feedback and somebody on staff will be glad to point you in the right direction.

Wrapping Up
That's it for our brief tour of DCIX. Hopefully you've found something there that you didn't know about, and something that will be useful to you going forward, as a player or as a judge. If you ran into anything that didn't make sense, if something seemed like it could be done better, or you have some other kind of comment, feel free to post in the forums. Better yet, don't be shy—submit some feedback and help us to build a better site!

Next week: Our fearless editor, Seamus Campbell, with the eventful story of the Oregon Two-Headed Giant State Championships.

Next month: The landscape of judging is always changing, with new rules, new cards, new policies, and new technologies. At the same time, for the vast majority of judges, judging is a part-time, volunteer activity on the side of whatever we actually do for a living. The unfortunate side effect of these facts is that it's really difficult to keep up. We'll talk about how to stay up to date as a judge, and the dire consequences that can arise if you don't—complete with a cautionary tale from the Washington State Two-Headed Giant State Championships.

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Nicholas J. Fang
DCI Certified Level 3 Judge—Redmond, WA
mtgjudge@gmail.com
Agbaar and Ag|Work on EFnet's #mtgjudge