End-of-Year Auditions with Student Engagement & Retention in Mind

May 01, 2025

Estimated Read Time: 5-7 minutes

By Rob Chilton

End-of-year auditions are often an unpleasant necessity for programs with ability-based ensembles. There are countless variables to juggle—music selection, scheduling, judging, student emotions, and both enrollment and retention all come to mind. Here are a few ways to structure your auditions to prioritize student experience and continued enrollment.

Messaging: Auditions vs. Placements

Years ago, I replaced the word auditions with placement evaluations. In this context, consider the difference between the two:

Auditions – A competitive process where performers demonstrate skills to earn acceptance into an organization.
Placement Evaluations – A process for determining a performer’s role or position within an organization they’ve already been accepted into.

For many, the word auditions can feel intimidating. Framing them as placement evaluations softens the tone and broadcasts a message that there’s a place for everyone here—we aren’t turning anyone away based on their current skill.

Music Selection: Balancing Accessibility & Challenge

The evaluation music should be approachable enough for all students to engage with, yet contain enough complexity to accurately reveal differences in individual skill levels. To accomplish this, I wrote my own. My evaluations included two parts:

Two Prepared Etudes – The first was required for all, while the second was optional and only required for those wanting to be considered for the top performing ensemble.
One Sight-Reading Etude – A brief excerpt that starts easy and gradually increases in difficulty, ensuring all students experienced some level of success while still providing enough insight to distinguish between skill levels.

As you can see, the music wasn’t long, but still gave everything I needed to make a solid evaluation in the limited time available for each student.

Reducing Variables

When possible, reducing variables in your evaluation process can promote student participation. Consider the following:

Who – I recommend having the same person evaluate all students—ideally the head director or primary teacher. This helps minimize variability in results.
How – I prefer one-on-one evaluations over round-robin formats, as they allow you to ease students’ nerves and build or strengthen personal connections.
Where – When possible, hold evaluations on the students’ home campuses. Asking them to travel elsewhere increases the risk of no-shows, which can negatively impact retention. (This was something we struggled with in our 8th graders when attending high school auditions.)
When – If possible, conduct evaluations during the school day. This almost guarantees full participation and is especially helpful for families who may struggle with transportation outside school hours.

Everyone Participates–Not Just the Enrolled

I started requiring every student to participate in evaluations for a few reasons:

Personal Connection – It gave me a chance to hear and talk with every student in my program and gave me the opportunity to open the door for on-the-fence students to rejoin, something I’ll discuss in the next section.
Dual Purpose Assessment – I could use their scores as their semester exam grades.
Flexibility for the Future – If a child who hadn’t signed up later decided to re-enroll, I wouldn’t need to make a special effort to hear them perform—I already had their scores.

Opening the Door for Re-enrollment with the Green Sheet

One major challenge with retention is that students often make course selections for the next year midway through the current one. This is especially tricky because some of our most meaningful experiences, like spring concerts, festivals, and trips, happen after those decisions are made. Students who initially opted out often silently reconsider, but without a clear path to rejoin, commonly stick with their earlier choice because rejoining feels too complicated.

My solution? The Green Sheet.

The Green Sheet is a simple, low-pressure re-enrollment form given at the conclusion of an evaluation to students who hadn’t signed up for the next year. All they had to do was fill it out, get it signed, and return it to us—we’d then deliver it to the front office and handle their re-enrollment for them!

It was called the Green Sheet simply because it was printed on green paper. However, an added bonus of calling it the Green Sheet was that we could discreetly remind classes when Green Sheets were due without drawing attention to those who hadn’t signed up. Each year, we received a handful of forms—all from students who made a quick midyear decision to try a flashy new elective and later had second thoughts.

Check out our music literacy method:

Posting Results

The way we share placement results with our students can have a big impact on their experience. Here are a few recommendations:

Talk About It – Prior to posting, set aside a reasonable amount of class time to talk with your students about how results will be posted. Reinforce that every person has a meaningful place in the program. Discuss the different emotions they might feel in response to the results and how to appropriately manage those feelings.
Post with Anonymity – When possible, post results privately or with some anonymity. This helps eliminate unhealthy comparison amongst individuals. I prefer posting results by student ID number. This way, they find their ID number and placement without spending excessive time analyzing others’ placements. (This is especially important now in the digital age of smartphones where kids can take pictures and circulate the results via social media and texts.)
Timing Matters – Post results at a time that creates the least amount of disruption to their daily lives and allows the most amount of time for processing. For example, I like posting results on a Friday after school so students view it on their way out the door for the weekend. They then have the entire weekend to process it before returning to school.
Provide Supervision – If posting in-person, provide supervision—especially with younger students. My associate and I stood in the room monitoring student behavior and helping students move along after they had viewed the results, reinforcing a “glance-and-go” type event.
Set Boundaries – Inevitably, some students will be upset with their placements. Since we posted them on a Friday afternoon, we set a clear boundary: no placement discussions—whether in-person, by phone, or over email—until after the weekend. This wasn’t about ignoring students’ feelings; it was about giving them space to reflect, talk with their families, and approach us with a clear mind. (Learning to pause before reacting is a valuable skill!)

Closing Remarks

I hope you found these suggestions helpful! Consider where small adjustments to your own end-of-year evaluations might improve your students’ experience and retention. Your students may not notice every detail you fine-tune to ease their journey—but they’ll feel the difference, and so will your program’s retention.

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About the author:

Rob Chilton is the creator and owner of Readymade Music, LLC and its content. Previously, Chilton was a middle school band director from 2007-2021. His most recent teaching position was the Head Band Director at Killian Middle School in Lewisville, Texas from 2014-2021.

Under his direction, the Killian Honors Band was named the 2018 Texas Music Educators Association CC Honor Band and performed at the annual 2018 TMEA Clinic/Convention. In 2019, the Killian Honors Band was invited to and performed at The Midwest Clinic in Chicago. Additionally, the Killian Honors Band was named a National Winner in the Mark of Excellence National Wind Band Honors Project in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019.

Chilton is a graduate of Southern Methodist University where he had the opportunity to study music education under the tutelage of Lynne Jackson and Brian Merrill. During his years as a middle school band director, Chilton continued his professional growth under the guidance of his primary clinicians, John Benzer and Brian Merrill.

Chilton’s mission for Readymade Music is to promote the overall well-being of music education and support school music teachers by providing solutions to help make teaching music more efficient and inspirational while increasing engagement for 21st century learners.