It is difficult to grade an exercise like this, which is so impressionistic, but applying a formula incorporating your own rankings and my judgment, this is what emerges. At the two extremes there is considerable convergence. Everyone loved INDOT, though you could argue their case is less impressionistic and—perhaps a little easier to argue. Everyone, but one, liked Rep. Hostetler, and in fact more people placed her/him first than they did any other group, but there were detractors who pulled down the overall score. INDOT had no detractors, and though only one person put them first, they never fell below 2^nd place and so are the statistical #1. My feeling is that they are joint firsts. Evansville, in 3^rd place is an interesting case because no-one could really decide what to think. They tied with Hostetler for the number of 1^st places, but they picked up two middle positions and one bottom ranking. Their case illustrates the fickleness of the mob. But they deserve a high placing in my opinion. The City of Bloomington wins the spread award getting about every ranking there is except, I should say, last. Much the same holds true for Communities along the way, though there were more lower-middle evaluations. Then there is a precipitous drop to CARR. Actually what killed CARR was the number of people who placed it last, even though they actually had one person put them 1^st and one put them in the middle. BCC really did not score with the class, everyone putting them in 4^th to last position. It does not seem to have been any one thing that killed them, because the low grades were coming in almost randomly for every criterion. The strange thing with this group is that some people gave them high scores for individual elements of their presentation, but uniformly ranked them low despite whatever saving graces the scorer had perceived. The lesson? INDOT had a tightly argued, smooth case that was, to a large extent, uncontentious. The BCC was thought to be outside the role-playing structure, and people thought that the BCC would simply never talk or act like this since the word Bloomington hardly came up. One writer thought that Congressperson Hostetler’s answers were "vague and evasive." He went on to say "great and convincing role playing!"

Wednesday, April 15, 1998