35 Years of NZ Agility Graduation System History

There have been some changes to the criteria for earning graduation points introduced in the new regulations on 1 January 2023. I found it hard to explain what graduation points are without putting them into historical context, so here’s a brief tour of how the graduation system in NZ has changed over the years.

In the Beginning…

Once upon a time there were two height groups (760mm and 380mm) and no splits. The first NZKC agility rules came into effect on 1 July 1987. I went to my first agility show in around 1994. There were definitely not a lot of dogs competing in agility yet, and most shows were only one day so people tended not to travel very far. There were people winning with dogs of all sizes, from German Shepherds to Shelties.

In the very beginning, Intermediate was called Open and it was, as the name suggests, Open to all. And if I remember correctly (sadly I have lost my copy of the 1987 regs), any top three placing in any class was enough to graduate out of Starters. These rules were adjusted as the sport grew more popular, and by the mid 90s the graduation criteria looked much the same as they do today – two wins or AD to get out of Starters, and three wins (or two plus ADX) to get out of Novice.

Random Splits

By the late 1990s, class sizes were beginning to get quite large in the upper North Island. Some handlers were getting frustrated that they kept getting 2nds and 3rds but could never quite manage to pick up the wins to go up the next grade. They felt that it wasn’t fair that people in other parts of the country could win without having to beat so many other dogs.

And so we introduced random splits. I can’t recall exactly when, but I remember my dog Toad winning a split Novice in 2003. The idea was that if a class had over 100 entries, it would be split into two smaller classes and two people could get that precious win. The NDTA (as our national event was known at the time) was exempt from this rule.

Split classes required an extra course change and an extra course walk. To save time, often the course change was fairly small, like reversing the direction of a small section of the course, or just running the full course backwards. There were two major complaints that kept popping up about the random splits:

• The extra course build/walk added time onto the day at large shows.
• Running similar courses for each split meant that people liked to compare their results against the other split. There was a lot of moaning from people who felt that they would have got a win or a ribbon if only they had been in the other split!

At first it was just Novice and Intermediate classes that split. But as Senior classes began to reach 100, some people were very unhappy about the idea of splits introducing an extra element of luck into which dogs took home the Challenges.

Enter … Graduation Points

And so we got rid of splits in in around 2007. Instead there was a new solution for large class sizes – graduation points.

If you got 2nd in a class of 75+ dogs, you would get a graduation point. If there were over 100 dogs, 2nd place would get 2 graduation points, and 3rd place would get one graduation point. And the points kept mounting up as the class size grew.

It was decided that 3 graduation points would equal 1 win, but that you would still have to get at least one 1st placing to move up the grades. In theory this would make it easier for those dogs who were regularly oh-so-close to winning to move up the grades.

In practice, a few dogs did move up using graduation points, but not as many as expected. It turned out that most dogs would pick up the wins required before they managed to rack up 3 points.

Height Splits

Height splits were first introduced in 2010.

The graduation points rule was not removed at the time – after all, there were dogs that had racked up a few of them, and they should be allowed to use them to move up.

Since then it’s been very rare for classes to reach 75 entries, except at an NZDAC. It’s happened from time to time at large South Island shows where there weren’t enough small dogs to split it. It’s possibly happened at the very largest shows in the upper North Island too, where there were over 75 dogs in the 500mm class. Most often, this would happen in Intermediate classes, where they were won by dogs who were already in Senior.

The 2023 Reset

Last year the Agility Committee included graduation points on the consultation document for variable splits. They wanted to dramatically reduce the number of entries required to offer graduation points.

I can’t find the results of the consultation on the website right now. I’d be very interested to see what people thought about that. I think I said that I felt the new proposed thresholds were too low. And then I completely forgot that graduation points were on the agenda at all. I didn’t even notice that they were changing when I wrote my last post about the AD and ADX changes.

And then I found out that …

As of 1 January 2023, the number of entries required to offer graduation points has been reduced from 75 to 16. This means that if there are more than the bare minimum 15 dogs in a class, the second placegetter will get at least one graduation point.

In a nutshell, the number of graduation points available for second place can be expressed with a handy-dandy formula:

(Class Size – 1), divided by 15, and rounded up

And then the third place dog will get one less point than the second place dog, and so on until you reach 0 points.

Why?

Perhaps the threshold did need to move down a little. It hasn’t changed since before we had height splits, and as a result they’ve rarely been on offer except at NZDACs. A new threshold of 45 or 50 dogs would have made sense to me – but why 16?

The AC’s rationale for the change is that there is a de facto standard in our system that beating 14 other dogs is good enough to graduate. And that therefore in a class of 16 dogs, there are two dogs that have beaten 14 other dogs and they both deserve to get some credit towards graduation.

This is a very different perspective from the initial intent of graduation points, which was to acknowledge dogs that were consistently near the top of unusually large classes. They are now about spreading out graduation credits to dogs that perform well in any class that is larger than the bare minimum of 15.

And this is likely to see a lot of dogs graduating through the levels earlier than they would under the current win-out system. Stay tuned for some real-world examples of what it might mean …