Most school music adjudication isn’t a 1st/2nd/3rd contest at all. At a Solo & Ensemble festival — the format run every spring by state school-music associations across the US — a student or small group performs for a single judge, who scores a rubric and hands back a Rating, not a placing. If every performer in the room genuinely plays at an “outstanding” level, every one of them can walk out with the top rating. That one design choice — rating against a standard instead of ranking against each other — is what makes this format look so different from a dance or elocution competition, even though the underlying judging mechanics (a judge, a rubric, a result) are exactly the same.
What gets performed at a Solo & Ensemble festival
A festival day runs through a small, fixed set of event types, each performed live for one judge in a short time slot:
- Solo — an individual performer on an instrument or voice, with an accompanist where needed.
- Regular Ensemble — a small, fixed-instrumentation group (duets, trios, quartets and similar standard chamber groupings).
- Special Ensemble — looser group formats such as a jazz combo, a madrigal group, a show choir or a percussion ensemble.
Every one of these is a judged, criteria-based item in eTalenter’s terms — Solo entered as an Individual competition, Regular and Special Ensemble entered as Team competitions, each scored by a single adjudicator against a rubric rather than compared head-to-head on stage.
Classes are set by experience, not age
Unlike an age-group kalolsavam or a school sports day, a Solo & Ensemble festival does not group performers by age or grade at all. Entries are classed by how many years they’ve played or sung: a beginner class for performers with roughly one to two years of experience, a middle class for three to four years, and an advanced class for performers at an advanced high-school level. The festival’s own rules are explicit that adjudicators must not take age or grade level into account, and performers are never even asked their age — the class is a statement about playing experience, nothing else. That’s a genuinely different grouping logic from almost every other scenario on this site, where an age band is the starting point.
No placements: Ratings I to V, measured against a standard
There is no 1st, 2nd or 3rd place anywhere in this format. Instead, a judge scores a fixed rubric of five or six criteria and the total decides a Rating from I to V — Rating I being outstanding, Rating V meaning the fundamentals still need work. Because every entry is measured against the same fixed rubric total rather than against each other, several performers in the same class can genuinely all earn a Rating I in the same room on the same day — there’s no quota limiting how many “wins.”
The advanced class adds one more tier above Rating I: a starred I, reserved for an exceptional performance that clears an even lower (better) rubric total. Note the scale runs backwards from most scoring you’ll have seen elsewhere — a lower rubric total is the better result, so Ratings are awarded on a “total is at or below this number” basis rather than “at or above.” There’s no 100-point scale and no published weighting between the five or six criteria; they’re treated as equal.
This is the same “placing vs. grade band vs. rating” choice we map out in our placings vs. grades guide — a Solo & Ensemble festival is the clearest real-world example of the rating model, where the top tier is uncapped rather than scarce.
Qualifying to State needs a starred I, not just a Rating I
Most festivals run on two levels: a District festival first, then a State festival for the entries that qualify. The qualification bar is specific — a performer needs a starred I in an advanced-class event at a sanctioned District festival in the same school year. A plain Rating I, even an excellent one, does not carry a performer forward. Registration itself is school-based: a school’s director enters students online, typically at least four weeks ahead, pays a fee per entry, and each student is capped at a fixed number of events across the festival (commonly ten).
Setting this up on eTalenter
- Create your experience classes (e.g. Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced) as Age Groups — used here purely as named tiers, since age itself isn’t the grouping criterion.
- Set Solo as an Individual item, and Regular Ensemble / Special Ensemble as Team items, so small groups are scored and rated together rather than as separate soloists.
- Build your rubric in Scoring Setup with a “lower total is better” condition, and define your Rating bands (Starred I, I, II, III, IV, V) as grades rather than placings — this is the same grade-band mechanism the kalolsavam A/B/C grading uses, just inverted and renamed.
- Flag the Starred I grade as the qualifying grade in your advanced class, and use Calculate Awards to pull only those entries forward into your State-festival registration list.
Our judge scoring & tabulation guide and rubric design guide cover setting criteria and weightings in more detail, and online entry with per-student fee limits works the same way our online competition registration does for any school event.
You can try the experience-class, rating-band and ensemble team-scoring setup yourself. Open a live demo and log in as a demo coordinator or judge — no sign-up required.
FAQ
Can more than one performer earn the top rating in the same class?
Yes. Ratings are measured against a fixed rubric standard, not against the other performers in the room, so several entries — or none — can earn a Rating I (or starred I in the advanced class) on the same day.
Why is a lower score better in this system?
The rubric totals a judge’s marks across several criteria, and the bands are defined as “total at or below” a number — so a smaller total reflects fewer deductions and a stronger performance. It’s the opposite direction from a 0–100 “higher is better” scale, which trips up anyone new to the format.
Does a Rating I at the District festival guarantee a spot at State?
No. Only a starred I in an advanced-class event at a sanctioned District festival qualifies a performer for State — a plain Rating I, at any class level, does not.
Running a Solo & Ensemble festival, band contest or any other rating-based music adjudication event on eTalenter? Message us on WhatsApp at +91 96056 56508 or email support@etalenter.com for help setting it up. Exact class definitions, rubric totals and qualification rules vary by state and association — check your own festival handbook before copying the numbers above.
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