Hey I have been to 4 tournaments this season and in 3 out of the 4 tournaments the judges have all been volunteers that happen to be from team competing in the tournament. A team mate and I have noticed that out of those 3 tournaments the team that the judges are from/parents of/a part of usually wins the awards that qualify for worlds. (Such as the Design and Excellence Award) Is it just me or has anyone else noticed this?
My Advisor and my entire team hold ourselves to VERY high standards and we have a lot of thought put into how to present ourselves to the judges and everything along those lines and we have even had parents and students from other teams come up to us and say that we deserved certain awards over other teams.
I feel like our team has gotten over looked in multiple occasions do to the judges’ bias towards their own teams.
After one of our tournaments I approached a judge because my team had worked so hard and we were very disappointed walking away empty handed. (We strive to compete and be the best in all categories of the competition and shoot for high-end awards.) Anyways, I asked her (In a very polite and professional way) what set the teams who won awards apart from us and she told me that my team was very good but the teams who won these awards were just a hair better. (I took it as “ok we need to work harder at this”) Naturally my next question was; In the future what can my team do better in order to achieve these statuses and honor. Her response was; You guys did so well, You guys were probably one of the best teams and you were among the top choices for a handful of awards. I feel like you guys were nearly perfect. I don’t think there is much you can do better.
I accepted this and thanked her for answering my questions but after this short discussion I felt cheated on the inside, having a judge tell me my team was pretty much a perfect team and still not winning one award.
All in all, I thought I would share this rather unfortunate experience with you guys and ask if anyone else has experienced anything like this? I AM NOT COMPLAINING, I am simply stating what happened and my feelings about it.
Are there any rules about volunteers being from a team? Like saying they aren’t allowed to judge their own team? Or they shouldn’t even judge? I am just interested.
I am not trying to have any negative comments on the judges at all. They were all really nice and did a good job, I just feel they were very biased towards their teams.
Please share any experiences you have had like this. I would like to know if it isn’t just us.
I appreciate volunteers alot, but i too think there needs to be more criteria for judges and refs who are connected to certain teams. My team recently went to a competition and made it all the way to the finals, we were winning by quite a bit and an opposing robot rammed into ours with their arm in the air and tipped themselves. They attacked first and we were disqualified. We were so stunned we coudn’t get it together for the next round. We lost the entire competition after five hours of driving to get there, because of their bias.
Normally i would have let it go, but the refs had been trying to get us disqualified all day and hadn’t allowed us to descore objects clearly over the top of the goal in multiple qualifying rounds. There definitely needs to be more rules along the lines of competition staff criteria, they need to have at least one official vex judge and ref at every competition.
I think it would be hard for VEX to even try to regulate this issue. In my opinion, the best way to deal with this issue is for teams to understand that winning awards isn’t the point of VEX robotics. Teams don’t need official recognition to be proud of what they’ve accomplished on and off the field. In the same way, community recognition is as powerful if not more powerful than the official awards and I and say that your team, 569C, is a team that is widely recognized in the VEXforum community.
However, if it was a question of a very good team that hasn’t qualified for the World Championship, then I’d reiterate that it’s a very hard issue to regulate.
We have a video in the finals of the RECF Video Challenge and we are 26th in Programming Skills but if both of those fail our season is over Our last tournament was yesterday.
After seeing the detail drawing sheets with custom title blocks in your timelapse video, I was surprised that you didn’t win the Design Award. Only time will tell, but I hope the best for your team. It was fun competing with guys!
It’s true that they do this, yet it still seems to be the “home team” or the teams that haven’t qualified who get such awards.
If you (the general you) keep denying the Excellence Award teams who have already qualified, you are lowering the standard of the robots at the World Championship and that makes for a worse competition overall, but a larger competition. I certainly question some of the Excellence Awards that have been given in the last four years I have competed in Vex Robotics. Even one that was given to my team, however it does give newer teams more experience and fosters more learning and aside from the competition aspect, that is the goal of Vex.
He means that denying the qualifying awards to the teams that most deserve them (who have already qualified) lowers the level of play at the World Championships. Ideally, the teams that deserve the awards would get those awards, but another goal of VEX is to foster education and performance and ending the seasons of robots by giving the awards to a team that has already qualified goes against that mantra.
We haven’t seen this issue come up at all. At our home meet when we hadn’t qualified yet, we were first seed, won the programing skills, and came in second in driver. 40J did equally well, getting 2nd seed (I think), 1rst in driver, and 2nd in programing. They received the excellence award, and I think that if the judges (at least one of them was a teacher at our school) were biased at all towards us, we definitely would have gotten it.
There were other times when we thought we should have gotten an award but didn’t, but the teams that received them weren’t home teams and we don’t think that there was any bias. (The judges have a tendency to come to us at the worst possible times.)
It is usually quite the opposite for us. We always walk away from the judges feeling really good about how that went but when we have matches we always somehow get paired up with the team that didn’t show up to the tournament or the protobots and stuff like that.
That’s exactly what I meant. Sorry for not explaining it that well. And I do think that by going to Worlds even when we may not have “deserved” to qualify (in the past), we have learned a lot from the experience and I personally have grown as an engineer and in my understanding of strategy, forming alliances, etc. So I do believe it can often be good for teams to qualify even if they may not have the best robot at a competition because it does provide a great learning experience. Also, at Worlds the GREAT robots tend to separate themselves from the rest of the pack anyway (Green Egg, 1103, Free Range, etc.).
However, regardless, what I am talking about is a slightly different “issue” that happens to overlap with the issue put forward in this thread on some occasions.
Haha. Yeah. And many times the judges aren’t doing it on purpose. They often just don’t know enough about the Vex system to properly judge. But that’s understandable.
We are always happy with our interviews when we actually have a chance to talk to the judges, but often they show up when we have to go to a match in two minutes. It is especially frustrating when we talk to one group of judges for >20 minutes and then another group of judges who decide the excellence award come right after them and a few minutes before we have to go to a match.
At the Golden State Championship (which CAMS hosted), we were able to avoid this problem by having two sets of judges (the tournament was divided into two divisions, so each division had its own set of judges) and scheduled interview times. We ran into some issues with interview slots being the same time as matches, but all in all judging went pretty smoothly.
Hey you guys are an amazing team, don’t feel bad if you didn’t get an award. You guys made it to the division semi’s yesterday, which is an amazing accomplishment considering the amount of competitiveness that there was in the math division. You guys are an amazing team, don’t let the awards tell you otherwise.
