Rules

[ChuckElias]

Originally posted by CLAY
If the guy wanted some smart As* answer he could have asked a coach.

And if he wanted to improve as an official, he could've called any other official in his area and talked through the situations, instead just getting a true or false from us. I see your point, I really do. But I also feel that just getting the answers doesn't really help one become a better official. That's just my opinion.

I thought this was a place you could come for help, not a place you come to and toot your own horn.

As far as I can tell, Clay, nobody has bragged about his/her accomplishments or rule knowledge in this thread. Nobody's tooting their own horn.

There has been a long-standing difference of opinion on this board about this sort of question for several years. There are two basic opinions. Tony and Mark, among others, feel that it's not particularly helpful to simply supply the answers to the tests. If you don't know the answer, then you ought to dig a little (either in the rulebook, or by hashing it out with other officials) to understand the answer. Otherwise, they ought to just give you an answer key along with the test questions. That's a valid position, I think.

Others, including at least one poster in this thread, think that tests are just about useless so it does no harm to supply the answers. They feel (I think) that the result that you achieve on a test has almost nothing to do with how you perform on the court. So you might as well just give the answers, b/c getting them right isn't going to make you a good official if you really stink; and getting them wrong isn't going to make you a bad official if you can actually call a decent game. I think that's a vaild position, too, although I happen to disagree with it.

So while you might not like Padgett's attempt at humor, or Tony rolling his eyes, it's not b/c they're smarter-than-thou. It's just an honest difference of opinion about how best to improve as an official.

[Edited by ChuckElias on Sep 15th, 2003 at 08:31 AM]