…monks is pure epic.
big up 2 all!
peace

I didnt see any update about the contest.

if there are any accusations “flying around”, they certainly aren’t mine. I haven’t accused anybody – merely made observations of some peculiar facts, and expressed my concern. My first thought was a glitch in the vote engine itself… Whoever said anything about accusations?

Apparently, Alfred thought the concerns were valid enough to warrant a change in the voting engine.

As for having friends vote… of course it’s okay! It’s natural – we can’t be expected to hide stuff from our friends, can we?

But letting the school know was, in my eyes, a few steps too far… you see, I’m a teacher myself – BA at teaching English (ESL). I only followed that career for one year, since I also have a Master’s in Architecture, but I do have a pretty good idea how things work.

If one of my students was participating in a contest, I definitely would NOT tell the school about it – I would leave it to them, if they wanted to do so. School pride is a very powerful factor. Students would certainly vote for their own, and in the end, the results would have no real meaning, the achievement would be hollow.

That’s why I would want my student’s contest to remain unbiased, so that the results would be of actual value to them – as a measure of real achievement.

As I said – of course inviting friends to vote is fine. I never said it wasn’t. But there’s quite a bit of a difference between that and having an entire school go vote. Regardless if you’d encourage them to make their own choice, nearly all students would always vote for their own anyway… it’s pretty obvious and to be expected. That is why I would never do so myself. And this is why I was pretty upset when it happened.

Normally, I’m very much against public votes in a contest like this as they tend to be pretty messy. They tend to turn into popularity contests, where, for example, a tracer with a ton of copied Naruto fanart in their portfolio would usually win against a far superior artist who mostly creates original, unpopular material. It’s one of the most upsetting problems on DeviantArt, for instance.

This particular vote was actually amazingly clean and unbiased – up until that moment. It’s just no fun anymore when it turns into a contest of whose school is bigger.

I was quite upset about such a turn of events, and if, in my frustration, I ended up saying something that seemed harsh to anyone – I apologize. My opinion on the school announcement, however, still stands…