No Middle School only awards

**SavannahCale** · February 17, 2019, 1:35pm

Was at a blended MS/HS event with 17 HS and 17 MS teams. When it was time for awards no middle school only awards were offered. This is a violation of tournament rules for blended events. When it was raised with the EP they had no response. What is the recourse that can be taken?

**lacsap** · February 17, 2019, 2:20pm

Blended events with 10 or more MS teams may give out a Middle School Excellence. The VRC Qualifying Criteria does not specify that events MUST give out MS Excellence. Ditto for the Judge Guide. The one requirement is that if an Excellence Award is given out, so must a Design Award.

Note this is not an official answer. Just an observation from the resources available to teams.

**Kim1** · February 17, 2019, 3:02pm

This was classified as a middle school event because there was not enough elementary teams available.

**Got_a_Screw_Loose** · February 17, 2019, 3:05pm

Uhhhh… this is the EDR/U category. I think you might have the wrong thread.

**SavannahCale** · February 17, 2019, 3:07pm

The issue is that there were 2 middle school only teams and 2 high school only teams that were being judged for excellence. The judges had a hard time and returned the books once. Then 10 mins later came back and took all books back and compared all 4. The awards listed for event on Robot events listed middle school only excellence and design award for middle school in addition to the same for high school. If it is listed in your sign up why was it not offered?

**SavannahCale** · February 17, 2019, 3:07pm

This VRC /EDR not IQ

**DougMoyers** · February 17, 2019, 3:23pm

This is the sort of issue you would discuss with your REC regional manager, which can be found at https://www.roboticseducation.org/contact-us/contact-info/

**lacsap** · February 17, 2019, 5:21pm

Ok with four teams, the following may come to play from the Judge Guide:

There may occasionally be cases where Judges should not award the Excellence Award to any team at the event. This may happen when either no teams submit an Engineering Notebook or when the only notebooks submitted are of a very poor quality.

It may well be that the middle school teams did not rise to the level needed to be awarded a second Excellence Award at the event.

There is no requirement that any Excellence Award be made if the judges do not believe there is a worthy recipient.