The Illinois Music Education Association was notified on Oct 9 that students who auditioned for the District 7 Senior Chorus may have had prior knowledge of the sight-reading material used in the audition and prepared it in advance. If that happened, those students would have had an unfair advantage of being selected to participate in the district’s senior chorus and the all-state choruses.
For the senior choruses, the association adds up the scores during student auditions in four broad categories:
- Prepared selections (40 points)
- Sight-reading (16 points)
- Tonal skills (16 points)
- Tone quality (28 points)
The prepared selection score is based on a student’s performance of excerpts from two pieces to be sung by the entire chorus at the festival. The score is subdivided into note accuracy, rhythmic accuracy, intonation, diction, and musicianship. The sight-reading portion, sometimes called sight-singing, is supposed to be based on how accurately students sing two very short vocal exercises they’ve never seen before the judge hands it to them at the audition.
Because of the possible breach, the ILMEA plans to recompute the audition scores for all students without the sight-reading trait score and notify any students who would then achieve a qualifying score for the district festival but weren’t invited after the initial, possibly tainted auditions on Oct 6 at Libertyville High School.
ILMEA district map
Then, to eliminate any possibility of unfairness or advantage gained by students who allegedly knew about the sight-reading selections in advance, the ILMEA will re-audition all students when they arrive for the District 7 festival at New Trier High School in Winnetka on Saturday, Nov 8, using new sight-reading selections. These new scores will be used for all-state qualification.
“ILMEA takes the integrity of the audition process very seriously,” wrote ILMEA’s executive director, Darcy Nendza, in an email message. “To know that this process has failed in any way is disappointing to the entire ILMEA family. The steps outlined above, plus any other actions deemed necessary by the ILMEA Executive Committee during this ongoing investigation, are designed to strengthen ILMEA’s student programs.”
The ILMEA divides the state into nine districts, as shown in the map above. District 7 includes schools in all of McHenry and Lake counties, the northern sixth or so of Cook County, and the extreme northeastern corner of Kane County.
If students must achieve a total score of one standard deviation above the mean to be accepted for the district senior chorus and students who cheated gained 9 points, on average, on the sight-reading portion of the audition, develop a mathematical model to simulate the number of students who will be newly invited to participate in the District 7 chorus. See Common Core math standard HSS.ID.A.4 for more information. (Assume a mean of 72 and standard deviation of 12. You’ll also have to assume other things.)