Managing Exam Director Steve Piatz recently announced that he would retire from the Exam Directorate after over 20 years of different roles ranging from grader to Exam Director and, most recently, over five years as the Managing Exam Director. BJCP Board approved Sarah Bridegroom as the new Managing Exam Director.
Sarah is a Grand Master judge in the South Region and was most recently an Associate Exam Director. Over the past two years, Sarah has worked on grader recruitment and retention initiatives. In addition, the Board approved Mike Bury as the new Associate Exam Director replacing Sarah. Mike is a Grand Master II judge in the Mid-Atlantic Region and has been an exam grader since 2013.
The BJCP thanks Steve for his tremendous dedication to the program and for his leadership in the Exam Directorate. Steve provided the letter below with history from his time in the Exam Directorate, including the many program improvements he was involved with. Please join us in thanking Steve for his years of service and welcoming Sarah and Mike to their new roles.
Steve Piatz’s History in the Exam Directorate
I graded my first set of exams in the fall of 1997, in the spring of 1998 I was a lead grader for the first time. At the start of 2000 I became an Associate Director and in early 2004 I handled my first set of exams as Exam Director. In February of 2013 I became the Managing Exam Director. During my time working with on BJCP exams, there has been a lot of change the the exam program.
While the Beer Study Guide (SG) existed when I started it did not really tell you what the questions on your exam were going to look like or how they would be graded. The exam consisted of 10 essay questions and four exam beers in three hours. Over time, we made tremendous changes to the beer program. We expanded the detail in the SG to show all the questions that might be on a written exam and included details on how they would be graded. We eliminated lots of the “beer trivia” aspects of the exam that looked for knowledge of interesting beer trivia that didn’t have anything to do with being a good beer judge. In 2012, we made major changes to the exam; we introduced the online Beer Entrance Exam as a qualifier for taking the Beer Judging Exam and separated the essay portion into the new Beer Written Proficiency Exam. Since we felt we now had a bigger pool of potential proctors available, we expanded the tasting portion to six beers and increased the tasting score to be 50% of the total exam score for National and higher ranks.
The written exam is managed as a bunch of different question sets each as a separate file. In the early days, the written exam questions were inconsistent where the wording of questions had small variations between different exams causing unnecessary confusion for graders and examinees. I developed a system that allowed us to generate the written exam files in a standard way with a standard look and feel so that the variations and typos could be cleaned up. The system made adopting the 2015 style guidelines a lot easier for the exam program. Today, the system is used to generate written exams for multiple languages such that the same questions are used in all the supported languages.
Initially, we were mailing copies of the completed exams around to graders and exam staff to complete grading. We also were mailing the exam paperwork out to all the exam administrators. Exam Directors were spending a fair amount of time making copies and standing in lines at post offices. As technology improved, we could just send electronic copies around for grading or just share the files using cloud-based technologies. These days we have an agreement with the American Homebrewers Association (AHA) where exam administrators can mail hard copies directly to the AHA for scanning, or the admin can directly provide the scans to the Exam Director.]
I administered the first BJCP Mead Exam in August 2008. Originally, the Mead Exam was structured like the beer exam with both judging and essay portions given at the same time. In 2015, we introduced the online Mead Entrance Exam as a qualifier for the Mead Judging Exam, mirroring the new Beer Exam Program.
Over my time with the exam program, the number of exams given in a years has increased tremendously. As the number of exams per year has increased, we have added more staff to the exam program. We have made many changes to the type of feedback produced by the exam graders. Changes were for both consistency of results and to increase the number of exams we could handle. We also worked to improve turnaround times for exam results, and while the averages tend to be faster, there are still the occasional delay when when life gets in the ways of all the volunteers involved in the process of grading exams. While we now have some basic online training for new graders, there is still the need for more.
One thing has never changed: we always need more exam graders. If you are a National of higher judge please email [email protected] if you are interested in grading.
While I am retiring from the exam program, I am not going away. I will still be judging and perhaps in the future I’ll take on a different role in the BJCP.