Assessing Six Turns With No Video and Fifteen Minutes
You are assessing a candidate for a teaching certification. The candidate must demonstrate six short-radius turns on a 22 degree hard-packed, partly icy pitch, then explain the movement pattern. There is no video available. You must not ski alongside: the pitch is 12 m wide with a 3 m drop to a cat track on the skier's left. The candidate's upper body rotates ahead of the skis at initiation and the hips follow. The tails wash out roughly 20-30 cm at the end of each turn. On turns three and four the inside ski diverges by about a boot width at the fall line. Afterwards the candidate says: 'That felt like clean carving - I was on the edges the whole time.' Wind is rising, temperature is minus 8, and you have 15 minutes before the lift closes.
1. Design the observation plan: where you stand, what you sample, and how you keep the assessment reliable given no video and a narrow pitch.
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Position. Stand about 20 m downhill and slightly above the fall line on the right-hand side of the pitch, so the drop to the cat track is behind you and you see the skier front-on through the turn rather than from behind. Never stand on the left.
Pre-brief the task so the sample is valid. Same start point, same turn shape, same target speed for all three runs. A sample taken while the candidate improvises tells you nothing about the standard.
Sampling protocol. First run: whole body, no focus - build a picture. Second run: watch only the relationship between the upper body and the skis. Third run: watch only the feet and the ski-snow interaction. Then repeat with the single most suspicious variable.
Reliability with no video. Your memory can hold one variable at a time, so anchor each observation to a repeatable event rather than an impression: does the tail wash happen before or after the fall line? Does the divergence appear at the fall line or at the end of the turn? Those timings are what makes the diagnosis defensible.
Close the loop. Record the conditions - ice, wind, 15 minutes - in the report. Six turns in these conditions is a limited sample and the assessment should say so explicitly rather than pretending otherwise.
2. Is the inside-ski divergence a cause or a symptom? Construct the causal chain and say what evidence would change your answer.
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Divergence is a symptom.
The chain: upper-body rotation at initiation drags the pelvis into the turn ahead of the feet; the outside ski is pushed sideways rather than steered, so the tails break loose by 20-30 cm; the inside leg is no longer managed by the turn shape, so it drifts up and diverges at the fall line.
What supports this reading. Timing. Divergence that appears at the fall line, immediately after a rotary push from the shoulders, is downstream of the rotation. If divergence appeared only at the very end of the turn, with the fall line clean, you would look instead at stance width, inside-leg length management, or an inability to hold the inside ski on edge. The tail wash supports the first reading: the outside ski loses grip because the edge is created by a push rather than by inclination and pressure management.
What would change your answer. If the candidate were rotating the upper body but the tails held and the inside ski tracked, the rotation would be cosmetic. If the divergence persisted when the candidate skied a pure carved corridor with no rotary input at all, you would look at equipment and alignment. Note that divergence plus tail wash plus shoulder lead is a coherent pattern; a single observation is not.
The candidate's report is data, not evidence. 'I was on the edges the whole time' tells you his internal model is built on feel rather than on ski-snow interaction, so your feedback must be anchored to observable timing, not to 'I saw you skidding'.
3. Deliver the feedback and explain how you would score a six-turn sample fairly against a rubric.
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Feedback in three parts, under a minute.
- The standard in one sentence: short-radius turns with consistent shape, edge control, and upper-lower body separation.
- The single most impactful gap, with evidence about timing: 'Your shoulders start the turn and the tails release after the fall line.' Not 'you skidded' - that invites a debate about feel.
- One task for the next run: same corridor, hands quiet, let the feet change edges first.
Then ask him to describe what he felt when the tails washed, so the felt sense gets attached to the evidence. Do not list five faults - he can act on one thing in a single run.
Scoring fairly.
- Score only the criteria you could observe: turn shape consistency, edge versus skid character, separation. Mark anything you could not see as 'not demonstrated' rather than guessing a mid-range score.
- Treat the six-turn sample as a sample. If the rubric needs sustained pressure to reveal separation, note that the sample was insufficient instead of scoring the candidate down for your own limited view.
- Record conditions and duration; if the result is borderline, that is what a re-assessment is for.
- Separate the assessment conversation from the coaching conversation. Give the score, then the coaching - not the other way around.