It’s fairly well known by this point that in order to be eligible for some judged awards at Worlds, you must have earned Excellence at a Worlds-qualifying event (States/Signature) to win Excellence, and have won Excellence or Design to win Design. What if we did the same thing for state competitions?
There is good reasoning behind this rule: these requirements serve as a way of reducing the number of teams that need to be judged (something that’s especially crucial with thousands of teams, but still helpful for smaller events). Reducing the amount of teams that need to be judged would help keep tournaments running on time, and would also reduce the number of judges needed. The latter could let tournaments be more selective about who is allowed to be a judge; in a perfect world, all judges at World qualifying events would be experienced, but due to numbers, that just is not always a possibility. One way, however, that we could take some steps towards that ideal by limiting judging to teams that qualified via a judged award.
The purpose of this thread is to invite people to debate the following questions:
Should awards at the state level be subject to the same restrictions as at Worlds? Namely, should a team have to win an Excellence or Design award at a local, state-qualifying, tournament as a prerequisite to winning a judged award at States? What about edge cases, such as team that did win a design award, but at a competition that only qualified Excellence and Tournament Champions for States, and got into States via skills? What unintended consequences do you think might occur with a rule like this?
Then there’s the issue of regions with few local events. I know our region has a total of 4-5ish events every year so if a single team won judged awards at each local event and didn’t show for states what would happen? Or if a school only goes to one event a year would that be fair to them? I think the current system works fine, and the common procedure for separating good notebooks from the bad and such narrow the teams enough for judged awards.
And if they could collect all notebooks they would. It’s just a logistical issue. They used to do it, I forget when they cut it off. But they just can’t. Even at regional events with 60 or 70 teams having all teams turn in their notebooks is very managable.
No, I don’t think that would be a good plan. In Wisconsin we have a lot of events and many good teams attend multiple events. As a result we have about a 60% multiple qualification rate for state. We often invite 1/3 or more of the field (for HS VRC anyway) from skills. By limiting some awards to only award winners from the season, we would effectively ignore a good portion of the field.
Now, realistically, the teams that win Excellence, Design and some other awards have likely won those awards at multiple events during the season, but I still don’t like the idea of limiting the rest of the field from having a chance.
So if you did this for a state such as VA which I still think has a slight under on events.
You’d have a handful of teams for Design, and even fewer for excellence.
It makes it easier on judges, but for a 56 team HS division leaves few for consideration. Not to mention that on top of the regular awards considerations.