Yesterday and today I had to do auditions to get into the right class group.
Last night was the "peer audition", in which we were partnered up at random and
had to rate each other, and this morning was the "teacher audition" in which
the teachers applied their expert judgement while watching us dance.

The peer auditions are new this year, I think. It is a good system. You get a
few practice dances to warm up and to set your expectations. Then you get at
least three (and in my case five) short dances with randomly chosen partners.
Immediately after each dance you give your partner a scrap of paper with your
ID on it, and they write a digit from 1 (bad) to 6 (good) and put it in a
bucket. Then some poor sod sorts the scraps of paper and computes the average
score for each person. There are several reasons why I think this is a good
system:

 - Everybody is motivated to be nice to each other, to dance to the best of
their ability, and to dance to their partner's strengths. There is no future
in trying to prove that you are better than your partner.

 - The (implicit) criteria you are rated on include not only your dancing but
also your floorcraft, your manners, your sense of humour and so on.

 - You get a total of about ten minutes of individual attention, which is
enough to discover how you cope with mistakes, whether you do the same moves
over and over again, how you respond to the music, and things like that.

 - The person rating you is actually dancing with you, so they can feel what you
do as well as seeing it.

To cut to the chase, I did well in the peer auditions (top half) but the
teachers marked me down, and I ended up in group 2 (of 2). I am entirely
satisfied with the process and the result, not least because it is the first
time I have attempted an advanced level course. The follows in my class are far
from perfect, but so am I, so fair enough. After my first two lessons I have
managed to do everything the teachers asked, but I am glad the classes are not
going any faster.