Looking at results

Recently, I did an analysis of our Jiu-Jitsu school's Gracie University exam results.

It was only material from one level, called BBS1, but it could be expanded later.

Shawn, our instructor, thought it was a good idea, and gave me access to the pertinent test videos and grading reports. It all went pretty fast, as we've only ever had 5 students perform the exam in question.

The goal was to find out if there were any common flaws. This could lead to improvement in instruction, and general improvement in all of our students' performance. Not only potential improved test results, but better Jiu-Jitsu in general.

So I went through all of the technical drills by the 5 students, and correlated all of the negative comments. Overlapping errors would be a strong indicator of a potential problem. Single error comments would be idiosyncratic errors of the student who received them.

It seems that we might have a few generally weak techniques amongst the 180 or so variations the exam covers.

1)-Three of us had errors on (Guard) Posture Prevention-Emergency Punch Block. I know Shawn teaches the correct movement, so perhaps something like more drill would be helpful here.

2)-There was another 3-person error on (Guard) Butterfly Guard-Strong Side Sweep regarding the over-hook arm control.

3)-In the two, highly-related sweeps in (Guard) Spider Guard there were a total of five errors. Something to catch here perhaps.

Interestingly, there were the 4 significant errors I have listed above within the Guard/Half-guard segment of the exam. All of those 4 errors occurred in the Guard chapter, and none in Half-guard.

The Mount/Side-mount segment had zero significant errors.

There was only a single significant error in the Back-mount/Leg Locks/Standing segment. It was in Leg Locks.

4)-This was a 3-person error in the last movement of (Leg Locks) Knee Locks Primary Counter-Triangle Get-up. I consider this the least significant of the group's errors. These negative comments were all received by our 3 students who took the exam early in 2012, and not repeated by the 2 students from late 2013 tests. This would indicate we longer perform this movement in the negatively-received manner.

If these results are correct, a little more attention devoted to the 3 troublesome techniques indicated could improve future BBS1 exam scores by several points.

Pretty good information garnered from a couple of hours of time invested.