There is a method to the madness, and it actually works out to the student's benefit in the long run due to how the MASS ranking is calculated. Trust me, nobody who "rocks the CTS" gets shafted on assignment night because of MIF grading.
Exactly right. There is some "gamesmanship" that goes on with the grading, especially with the overall sortie grade, and to a lesser extent with the MIF grading as well. It is basically nothing more than the exercise of good instructor judgement, though (when properly practiced).
For example, take a maneuver like an immelman. If I take a guy out on his first advanced acro ride, and before the sortie I give him a twenty minute brief on the immelman, and then once airborne I demonstrate a good immelman, talking through everything I'm doing like a good instructor should, chances are, ten seconds later when I give the airplane to him and ask him to do an immelman he will probably do it pretty well. Is that a "Good" or an "Excellent?" Maybe, but maybe not. Many people can "monkey see-monkey do" a maneuver they just saw ten seconds ago and make it look pretty good, but ask them to do it again ten minutes later (or the next day) and the second attempt turns out awful. They haven't really "learned" the maneuver yet, because it takes some time and some repetition to move those items from your short term memory to your long term memory/muscle memory. So I may not be grading entirely on what the airplane did, but a little on the level of instruction that I had to give to the student in order to make the airplane do what it did. On the student's first attempt at a maneuver, particularly if he only gets the chance to do it one time that sortie, I may not be fully convinced that maneuver is really "learned" and hence, I may grade it a little lower.
Same story on a maneuver that the student flies poorly ten times in a row, and then on the eleventh and last execution he nails it. Did he REALLY learn it on lucky number 11... or was it just luck? And how is he going to do on that same maneuver on attempt number 1 tomorrow? We used to joke about the over-night etch-a-sketch effect. You would practice and practice a maneuver with a guy a bunch of times, and he would finally get it down pat... and then he would go to sleep that night. When he woke up, it was like his brain was an etch-a-sketch and someone shook it. You'd be back where you were before all of that practice again. I heard other IP's describe it like throwing spaghetti at a wall... you throw a whole bucket of noodles at the wall, and hope that a tenth of them stuck when the sortie was complete. And you would hope that about half of those were still stuck to the wall the following morning. If I can get a guy to a safe level after showing him the maneuver 4 or 5 times, but I have to demo the maneuver to him once on a subsequent flight before he can do it to a safe level AGAIN... well, then those "safe" executions on the first sortie weren't really "him performing to a safe level," because he did not REALLY learn it. If you can do it today, but you can't do it tomorrow... then you probably couldn't REALLY do it today, either.
Of course, all of this relies on the IP to have some judgement... and judgement, like everything else, is a learned skill. It doesn't happen overnight either.
