Reflections 2024-2025

Acting NCC Reflections Chair: Matthew Cheng (webmaster@nccouncilpta.org) 

• Submissions from students to unit PTAs due: Oct 1st (each PTA can decide the best deadline for themselves as long as they can submit to NCC on time)

• Submissions from units to NCC due: Nov 1st

• Submissions from NCC to Ninth District due: Dec 2nd

• Showcase and Celebration for the winners at NCC level: EWMS the Cove, 5-7pm Jan 16 Thu

Once you have collected your submissions on Oct 1, you will judge them and forward on to NCC the results of your judges determinations and the artworks by Nov 1.  NCC then judges and sends results and artworks to Ninth District on Dec 2 and from there they determine what rises to CAPTA.

• Paper/pdf entry form

• Virtual entry form template (training for the virtual entry form)

Each unit can accept an unlimited number of submissions from your students. A student can submit in more than one art category but no more than one submission in the same category.

Each unit should then judge your students' submissions based on the criteria listed in Judging Rubric and select at most 3 submissions (across all grade divisions) per art category before forwarding to NCC. The limit of 3 submissions per arts category means the total across all grade divisions, not per grade division in that category. For example, you can have 1 from primary, 1 from intermediate and 1 from middle school division, or 2 from middle school and 1 from accessible arts. How you select the 3 entries advancing to NCC from different divisions in that category is up to your PTA (ideally based on the scoring as described in Judging Rubric) but the total should be limited to 3, unless you have some special reason and in such case, please discuss with me separately.

• Dance Choreography: (Digital only) Video file not exceeding 5 minutes and 1 GB in file size and be in MP4 / MOV / AVI format

• Film Production: (Digital only) Video file not exceeding 5 minutes and 1 GB in file size and be in MP4 / MOV / AVI format

• Literature: (Digital only) Writing not exceeding 2,000 words on a single 8 ½x11” page in PDF file. If submission in paper format only (on single-sided 8 ½x11” paper), take a photo or scan it into a pdf file.

• Music Composition: (Digital only) Audio recording of the composition not exceeding 5 minutes and 1 GB in MP3 / WAV format

• Photography: (Both Physical and Digital) Physical print image no smaller than 3x5 inches and no larger than 8x10 inches (no framing). Digital image files in JPEG / JPG / PNG format with at least 640x960 (pixels) and 300 dpi (resolution).

• Visual Arts: (Both Physical and Digital) 2D artworks must be no larger than 24x30 inches with matting (no framing). Include one digital image of artwork with your submission. 3D artwork submissions must contain 3 digital images of artwork at different angles. Digital image files in JPEG / JPG / PNG format.

The above should apply to at least the final selections forward to NCC. Details of the format guidelines for each category can be found in the student entry packet.

Physical artworks (visual arts, photography, literature): Matthew will arrange with each unit PTA's Reflections Chair/President and come to your school's front office to pick up your selected entries on Nov 1st (between 9am-12pm). Please write your PTA name on the back of your selected physical artworks. Each unit should also submit and upload the digital forms of your selected physical artworks (see below).

Digital files: Submit and upload the digital files of your selected submissions by using this Google form by Nov 1st 12pm (this form is for submissions from unit PTAs to NCC; please don't use it for your students to submit to your PTA). If a unit has used your own virtual entry form to collect students’ submissions, you don't need to re-submit using the NCC virtual form but share your form's generated Google sheet (with the selected entries highlighted and columns AK-AU filled) and the associated submission folders with Matthew (webmaster@nccouncilpta.org). You have to use a Google account to submit to this Google form. If you don't have a Google account at all, please contact Matthew.

Unless your PTA uses the virtual entry form from your students, please have the students submit the paper/pdf entry form from the student packet together with their artworks and you will need to copy the information from the paper/pdf entry form to the NCC virtual entry form when submitting your selected entries to NCC.

Update 2024-10-22

Some of you have asked me about the digital submission to NCC via the Google form and said it is quite time consuming and troublesome to enter that form. If using that Google form is too much trouble to you, please use this spreadsheet as an example to fill out the information for the entries you forward to NCC (make a copy yourself and then replace with the actual info of your advancing entries). The spreadsheet includes all the info that Ninth District and CA State require. For submission to the NCC level, it is ok to enter info for the highlighted columns only:

• Student info column D-G

• Artwork info column R-V. If you have the info on the paper entry form only, please still manually enter the title/grade division/arts category, then add the image/pdf link to the 2nd page of the paper entry form showing the details and artist statement sections. Please do not add the 1st page of the paper entry form there as it has the student and parent info. Note that these columns will be passed to the judges.

• Link to the digital form of the artwork in column AD-AJ. Note that these columns will be passed to the judges.

• Your PTA info in column AK-AU

If you use the spreadsheet instead of the Google form to submit your entries advancing to NCC, please make sure the artwork links you copied into the spreadsheet are shared with "Anyone with the link" as "Viewer". These links will be passed to the NCC judges for their judging, so they need to be viewable by anyone with the link.

After NCC completes our judging, for entries selected to advance to the Ninth District level, I'll need your help to manually enter the details and artist statement info back (instead of the link) and the parent email/name/number/address in the spreadsheet.

• As mentioned before, NCC allows each unit PTA/PTSA to submit up to 3 submissions per arts category (3 is the total across all grade divisions in your school per arts category).

• If you have 3 or fewer submissions in an arts category across all the grade divisions in your school, you could choose to forward all of them to NCC without judging.

• If you have more than 3 in an arts category, you will need to do judging based on the guideline in Judging Rubric. After you have the scores, you can decide which final 3 to be forwarded to NCC. For example, you could choose the 1st place from each of Primary (TK-Grade 2), Intermediate (Grade 3-5) and Middle School (Grade 6-8) divisions. Or 1st place from Primary division and 1st and 2nd places from Intermediate division. Or 1st, 2nd and 3rd places from Middle School division. Etc.

• If you would like to submit more than 3 in an arts category due to some special reason (e.g., tied scores), please notify and discuss with me beforehand.

• You only need to submit the entries you decided to advance to NCC digitally via the Google form/spreadsheet and leave those physical artworks at your school's front office, which I'll pick up on Nov 1st.

On the student entry form pdf, there is a section labelled "This section to be completed by PTA before distribution". It is not to be filled by the participating students but by the PTA. On the virtual entry form, section 9 is the equivalent section. The dates we need from the unit PTA are:

• Insurance Paid Date: It is the date your treasurer paid the insurance premium for the 2025/01-2026/01 coverage (or the expected date your treasurer will pay if not yet paid)

• Member Dues Pail date: It is the date when your treasurer issued the check of membership due remittance to NCC for the first 15+ members.

• Bylaw Approval Date: It is the date right next to the CA State Parliamentarian's signature in the Signature section (right before the Standing Rules) on your PTA bylaws.

Note that the "Bylaws Approval Date" should be within the past 5 years (2019 or newer). If it is already past 5 years (2018 or older), the unit should let the council and district know you are currently working to review/renew it and the reviewed/renewed bylaws need to be submitted by December this year.

In the CAPTA FAQ, they mentioned "Have a process to do a check to make sure there isn’t AI or plagiarism so that student work doesn’t get disqualified as it goes up the channels." But they did not say how. This is a very interesting subject these days and I found two articles talking about it:

https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-detect-chatgpt-written-text

https://www.pcmag.com/articles/how-to-detect-ai-created-images

In short, there is no fool-proof way to identify AI or not and there are false positives and false negatives from the current tools available. For example, I briefly tried the GPTZero tool mentioned in the article above and it thinks a write-up generated by ChatGPT is 84% chance human written while my own write-up of the same topic is 97% chance human written. 

For photo/drawing, you can use "Google Lens" to check if there is any copyright issue.

For video, if you have Google account, you can upload the video to Youtube and Youtube will check if it has any copyright issue.

For music, you can use a phone app called SoundHound. You can play the music on another device (e.g., a PC) and use the app on your phone to listen to the music and within seconds, the app can tell you what song it is if it can find it in its database.

• NCC judges will score the entries forwarded to NCC. Entries will be compared with each other in the same grade division in the same arts category.

• In each of the 6 arts category, the 1st place in each of the 5 grade divisions will be awarded the Award of Excellence (blue ribbon), the 2nd place the Award of Merit (red ribbon) and the 3rd place the Honorable Mention (yellow ribbon). Everyone participating in the NCC level will get a certificate.

• All Awards of Excellence at the NCC level will advance to Ninth District.