Hi, my friends and I were getting ready for regional competition and came across this question. This is more of an event procedure question so I don’t find any rules on it.
Simply put, is it legal for event partners to delay award procedure? Like, delay announcing awards (even to competitors/coaches) until way after the event ends? And if this is nor legal, how could one fix it?
Oh my loaded questions…
so events may have to delay certain procedures delayed and awards … For example, Alliance selections delayed while determining if teams are present or eligible. Or if a procedural error (like awarding two judged awards to same team…).
So yes, it may be delayed due to a number of factors outside EP control and warrants delays to “get it right.”
This is EXTREMELY RARE (boomer voice!) ! Don’t worry about it. If a delay happens it is for good reasons.
Also, spots pulled from skills are not EP’s decisions, but RECF - all outlined in Qualifying Criteria.
I understand what you saying, but perhaps you are missing the points of my question?
I am asking what if the EP decided to delay it to after the event ends. Like, the event is officially over but no awards have been handed out. All of the teams go home, and no one knows who won any judged awards. The EP says they cannot say who won judging awards, only that they will get posted at some later date.
I understand delaying it during the event (as in, the EP plans on ending the event after award ceremonies, but needs to sort things out before it can happen), but what about this case? It seems kind of weird for teams to leave an event and not know who won the judging awards. Imagine if this was regional championship event, and some of those awards qualified for Worlds!
Are you describing a hypothetical situation?
Results must be uploaded to RobotEvents at most 48 hours after the event concludes per the Qualifying Criteria.
There are situations where an EP and/or Judge Advisor may determine there are no teams eligible for an award listed (i.e. if no teams meet the excellence criteria).
Generally speaking (and in my experience almost universally) EPs try to follow the qualifying criteria as closely as possible – they’re all volunteers anyways, where all in this for the same purpose. We kind of have to assume good faith, and have processes in place for the edge cases.
If you’re referring to something that happened at an event you attended, then I would refer you to the globally pinned post, and you should reach out to your EEM. They are the person that should handle it.
Rare, but it does happen. I gave one specific example, say multiple judged awards to same team, Judges have left the venue. In that case, EP can not give out the awards and must wait until it is properly sorted out by the Judge Advisor. It has happened. The EP should make an announcement that Judged Awards will be announced after the event.
You don’t give enough context to determine what really happened. I would reach out to EP and ask.
So, I agree with @lacsap, it’s a pretty loaded question. But in the very early days of events, I was an EP at an event. My Head Judge had a medical emergency and the other judges and I spent time at the event getting them treatment and making sure they were OK. Two of the judges that were friends went to the hospital to offer support.
I announced it, and said it would delay the picking of the judged awards to Monday. Nobody had a problem, there was a bigger concern from the roboteers that the Head Judge was going to be OK (and it turned out they had a 100% recovery).
So to loop back to the rules, Safety is number 1, and I followed that.
Ok, so I’m here imaging that going “and the point is?” So you find out a few days later that you are going / not going to Worlds? Is that different than the event being snowed out and getting pushed back to the next weekend? You then need to go an entire week of not knowing? Is that different than not knowing at the start of the season if a team is going/not going to Worlds? You had to wait 6 months to find out?
If your team thought for a second that they were going to Worlds you would have started some level of planning before the event. It would make me sad to for teams to have done an entire season of VRC, worked all the things that the program is about to end up at 3:15 on a Saturday going “Wow, we just won a ticket to Worlds, now what?”
Teams that have Worlds aspirations have a strategy in place if they win, have planned out what they need to do for logistics, a schedule for those activities to happen, alternate ideas if some of the plans don’t work out. Well before the referee goes “3-2-1 stop” on the last match of the day.
But, if your premise happens to you where there is a delayed result, take it as a life lesson that most of life doesn’t happen on your schedule. Take a page from the Boy Scouts “Be Prepared”
Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
Like I say,
This never happen to us, just a question we had. Thanks for responding : )
Well, the issue we had is that if it isn’t announced during the event, EP could tamper with results. Since nothing is finalized during the competition, who knows what could happen? (I personally have gone to event where EP would love for all his team to win- would not be surprise if something happens with results)…
Yes, because if entire event is pushed back, no award decisions would even be started. With delayed award announcement, judging and award decisions would be started. The fundamental difference is with hypothetical scenario in my question, teams would know who won the event, but no awards. With yours, teams would not know who won event because there was no event (yet).
If we’re at the point of an EP hypothetically delaying when awards are announced solely to go in and change who won the event to their own team without anybody knowing… I’m not so naive as to say that an EP or a head ref or a judge or whoever has never had a conflict of interest that lead them to a, let us say, nonstandard decision when given the large amount of discretion you need in order to allow a program like this to function, but I cannot imagine somebody going through the effort it takes to run an event and then just doing something so completely blatantly unethical. Not just unethical, I feel like that might actually be like… actual criminal fraud.
I guess the best answer to your question is yes the EP can delay giving out awards because there is no rule against it, and there may be cases where it’s warranted, but it would definitely not be a normal thing to happen. If it did happen, I would expect the EP to announce why it had happened, and if they either just didn’t explain it or they did but their reasoning seemed suspicious to you… then contact the RECF and let them handle it.
I like the @AlecMiller answer, but I’ll add a question.
If the EP holds the score of the last final match, is it known? It’s the Schrödinger’s Match thought experiment, written in 1936 after Cat Ladies ™ took umbrage at the paper about Schrödinger’s cat from the year before. The “Match” experiment is that if the match has not been officially scored (i.e the judges ruling has not been made final) is it over and known or is it not over, therefore unknown. How do we prove the match state? Does quantum theory support this?
In your thesis, adding on the unknown of the judged awards, is the timeline compressed because two unknowns (judges and the final match) or does time expand with the unknown judging but the possibly known match state. If I were now to expand on; is this expansion / compression known only to the participants or is observable. Much as traveler moving at the speed of light observations about time with respect to an external observer. An interesting topic, maybe material for another TED talk.
As an EP moving ever closer to two decades of doing events, I’m annually annoyed by these types of allegations, even if it’s a hypothetical.
As a new-ish EP (only few years) still learning the intricacies and the politics involved (not the rules or the equipment, oh no no no, those are super trivial) I would say:
If you are concerned about the final (tournament champions)… there are the teams, the refs, the scorers, the myriad of people who took pictures and video, if a states level event there’s probably some webcast going… unless there’s a close call that needs to be reviewed carefully that might result in a DQ, I simply don’t see how you can manipulate the results.
If we are talking about the judged awards (like Excellence, Design and so on) then in your scenario we have to assume that all the people involved in the judging process including the judge advisor are completely crooked (as in dishonest) as they all have to be on it for something like this to happen.
Also, from personal experience - it is difficult and costly both financially and time/health wise to prove yourself and raise to the rank of a decent EP. You want to be known for the best event ever and you want everyone to have a great experience. I too want my teams to go to Worlds and some years they do some years they don’t. What lesson would I teach my teams? It’s just not worth it to even think that way.
Sometimes, we need to trust that there still are good honest people who care and whose goal in life is not to rip you off left in this world.
This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.