How to Tell a McDojo: a Twelve-Point Checklist of Warning Signs

1. You had to sign a contract of a year or more before your first class.

   Why it matters. A school confident in its teaching keeps you by teaching well. Long lock-ins move the risk onto the student and are a retail tactic, not a training one.

2. Children under about twelve hold black belts.

   Why it matters. A dan grade is meant to certify adult competence under pressure. Awarding it to a child either redefines the grade or admits it is decorative.

3. Every grading carries a separate fee, and the fees rise with each rank.

   Why it matters. Charging per grading gives the school a direct financial interest in promoting you. That is a conflict of interest sitting inside the assessment.

4. Nobody ever fails a grading.

   Why it matters. If the test cannot be failed it is not a test. A grade that everyone passes measures attendance, not skill.

5. You are told roughly how many months your black belt will take.

   Why it matters. A time-based promise is a delivery date on a product. Competence does not arrive on a schedule, and quoting one means the schedule is the thing being sold.

6. There is no sparring at any level, ever.

   Why it matters. Technique that has never met a resisting partner is untested. A school may sensibly delay sparring; removing it entirely removes the feedback that tells anyone whether the technique works.

7. The instructor holds an unusually high rank, or several titles, awarded young.

   Why it matters. Rank inflation is easy to spot once you know the normal pace. A tenth dan in their thirties has been graded by an organization that grades generously — often their own.

8. You cannot find out who graded the instructor, or under whom they trained.

   Why it matters. Lineage is checkable in a genuine organization. Vagueness about it is usually not modesty.

9. Branded equipment and uniforms must be bought from the school.

   Why it matters. A modest markup on kit is normal. A requirement to buy everything in-house turns the class into a distribution channel.

10. Classes are mostly fitness drills with little correction of individual technique.

    Why it matters. Correction is the actual teaching. A class that only makes you tired is a fitness class with a uniform.

11. The school teaches strikes said to work without contact, or pressure-point knockouts.

    Why it matters. These claims fail whenever they are tested on someone who is permitted to move. A school that teaches them has stopped checking its own material.

12. Training elsewhere, or asking why a technique works, is discouraged.

    Why it matters. A school that cannot survive its students seeing another school is protecting its business, not its art.

YOUR SCORE

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Reading your checklist score honestly

A checklist is a prompt for a conversation, not a verdict on your instructor. Learning how to tell a McDojo is useful precisely because most schools are not one.

No score is a diagnosis. One or two signs describe plenty of decent clubs run by people who are good teachers and poor administrators. A cluster of them describes a business model.

It is worth being explicit about which signs carry the most weight, because they are not equal. The three that matter most are all about assessment: whether anybody ever fails a grading, whether the instructor's own grade can be traced to an organization that exists, and whether a timescale was quoted to you. A school can be commercially aggressive in every other respect and still teach well, but once the assessment itself has stopped being real there is nothing left to be good at.

The signs people worry about most, meanwhile, are the weakest. Price is not one of them: rent, insurance and a decent instructor's time all cost money, and the cheapest club in town is frequently the one in a church hall with a syllabus nobody checks. Nor is a large children's program a warning by itself. Teaching children well is a specialism, and a school with a hundred juniors and two adult classes is telling you what it is for rather than confessing to something.

What to do if your own school scored badly

Leaving is not automatically the answer, and the first move is cheaper than that.

Ask. Most of the items on this list have an innocent explanation available, and an instructor who is running an honest club can usually give it in a sentence — the contract is the landlord's requirement, the grading fee covers an external examiner, the junior black belts are a separate junior grade with its own name. What matters is less the content of the answer than whether the question is treated as reasonable. A school that can discuss its own commercial arrangements without offense is a school that has thought about them.

If the answer is a lecture about commitment, or about how students today question everything, you have learned what you came to learn. And if you do decide to go, go quietly and without a speech. Nothing you say on the way out will change how the school is run, and the karate you already have goes with you regardless of who signed the certificate.

There is one situation where none of this measured approach applies, and it is worth stating separately. A school teaching techniques it claims work without contact, on students who have agreed in advance to be affected by them, is not making a commercial error that a conversation will fix. It is teaching a defensive skill that has never worked on anybody uncooperative, and a student who believes they hold one is worse off than a student who knows they hold none.