The JTP system, like most of the ratings submission system, works largely on the honor system, though we do check ages as a ‘reasonableness check’.
If you don’t like the current JTP rules, suggest to the Scholastic Council or the Delegates that they rewrite them, but you may not like the results.
Actually, that has nothing to do with what I was trying to ask. I was just wondering whether a kid who’s just finished third grade needs to go into the K–3 section or the 4–6 section. JTP only comes into it because eligibility is based on grade, not age.
How do you really know that the kid is even who he claims to be? How can we even have a tournament if we’re not sure who is playing?
another good point.
If the kid has played scholastics in the last year, you can likely determine his grade as of June 2010 by looking at his MSA history. If he played in the K-3 section during the last academic year, that’s where he would go for your summer tourney, assuming you don’t move them up a grade until September 2010.
I suspect most of the likely players in Keith’s upcoming JTP tournament will not have much MSA history, since he’s trying to generate chess activity in an area (NW Illinois) that has been rather dormant for quite a while.
It would certainly be easier for the USCF to enforce JTP restrictions if they were strictly age-based, but then that might run the risk of having SOME of the 3rd grade kids in a chess club be eligible to compete in a JTP event while others are not.
Primary JTP events are often local events, and ones that usually have close ties to the schools.
Of the 216 Primary JTP sections run since August of 2009, 121 were run by scholastic affiliates.
It seems reasonable that the organizer and/or TD of a Primary JTP event will have enough of a connection to the local scholastic community to be reasonably sure that the players in the event meet the K-3 limitation.
And lest we forget the original point of this thread, the only reason the issue came up is that his event is during the summertime. The USCF has no official policy on when to switch from one school year to another, that too is probably best to be based on local factors and knowledge of the local scholastic community.
So far, every state where I’ve applied for a teaching certificate uses June 30/July 1 as the bright line between academic years. The USCF could adopt this same policy, I suppose, with an explicit exception for year-round schools that use different dates.
Why create rules that have little or no practical impact?