I would also like to state that I made this topic out of curiosity more than anything. While it was disappointing not to get an interview our sister team won excellence for their first time. Plus I am a senior this year so next year I won’t be making a notebook for competition. I just would like to see a change where we can get more feedback from this side of the competition.
I know it is a bummer. Lots of us have walked in your shoes. Your future is bright!
If you want input from judges, you can ask the judges at your event to review your notebook and give you feedback unofficially later. As a judge, I’m happy to take an extra half hour after an event to judge a team unofficially and give them feedback, but I’m not willing to tell them what the rulings were made during the event. It’s difficult to know exactly what judges were thinking during an event, but its highly unlikely that the judges never looked through or considered your notebook or simply "DQ"ed it.
This is great advice, and I’ve actually done this before. It worked wonders and was a huge confidence booster. However, OP said they were in their final year of robotics, so unfortunately they will not be able to use this advice. For any others who are looking for judging advice, I would definitely recommend doing this if you are trying to take home an award, but are struggling to do so.
I have said before that we do this. However at this tournament the panel of judges for notebook left before any of us heard of the information
I think there could be a simple solution to this, similar to what @Foster has been piloting. What if there were 2 simple forms, like a quarter sheet in size, one for basic notebooks and another for notebooks that were in the top tier.
For the basic notebook, have 5-10 checkboxes for things to work on to get to that next level, based of the rubric.
For the top 20% notebooks it would be nice to know how far off you were from winning an award, and what areas you are lagging in. The other thing to keep in mind is that there is no “notebook award” Even the design award factors the interview in, so some feedback on the interviews for the top teams in contention would be nice. As a teacher, we talk about how meaningful feedback is one of the most crucial tools for learning.
As a teacher/coach/mentor/referee/judge/event partner, I have always had mixed feelings about the idea of feedback on the Engineering Notebooks. On one hand, I certainly agree that it would be great to have feedback so that those who care to can improve. When the thrust of the program is education, the feedback is a great thing to have. On the other hand, as someone who has judged and been an event partner, there are other considerations. One, regarding the rubric, it was never designed to be a feedback device for the teams. It is a tool for the judges to use. I applaud @Foster for attempting to come up with a solution. Returning the judge’s rubrics has been highly discouraged to 1) keep teams from complaining because they thought their notebook was better than someone else’s or because they might have actually scored slightly higher on the rubric than the winner, yet the winner knocked the interview out of the park. 2) protect the judges as they are volunteers and as well as we may try to train them, some of them are not necessarily adept at using rubrics and theirs might not be as clean of as helpful as one might think. That and depending on the size of the event and the size of the judging pool, asking the judges to take the time to do feedback that will truly benefit a team might just not be feasible in the time that is available. We need to respect their time as well.
My perspective from having judged is that there is often very little that distinguishes the top 4-5 notebooks from each other and that makes the award hinge on the interview and the views of the particular judges at the event that day. So, yes, it is a bit subjective. When the top 5 notebooks all score perfect scores on the rubric, what feedback will help? And if a notebook doesn’t get a perfect score, first check it against the rubric itself. It is possible for a notebook to get perfect scores at one event and not get perfect scores at another event depending on the judges and how they interpret the items on the rubric, no matter how objective one attempts to make the rubric.
All of that being said, as far as I am concerned, if winning awards is what one is mostly concerned about, then one is missing a big part of what the program is about.
And yes, I still wish there was a reasonable way to give feedback that accomplishes the goal in a manner that fits the realities of running an event.
You could try emailing them to see if they’d be willing to practice judging later?