I posted the following on a different thread. But it seems more fitting here. I do believe that judging should be a major factor in who advances to State and World–but there needs to be major improvements to the process to make results consistent. Major work also needs done to mitigate conflicts that exist.
Reporting conflicts to REC doesn’t really work because in order to protect the business and ensure future commitments, they must protect their EP’s, Judges, and all the volunteers. This is understandable.
So there needs to be a solution where the “the law” if you will, cannot be circumvented by anyone involved—and if enforced, results in more fair and unquestionable outcomes.
These are just a few issues/conflicts our teams have encountered:
--An EP is a coach of multiple teams attending, the spouse is the Judge advisor, and their daughter is on one of the EP’s teams. The optics is terrible here, and you can guess the backlash from the audience when the daughter’s team wins Excellence at their event. This is not a good situation and quite frankly unfair the child.
--An EP who’s got multiple teams in attendance (6-10) uses anywhere from 1-3 day old teamwork match schedule at the actual competition. When the other teams mumble and buzz about it in the pits, the EP announces that any complaints about a randomly generated match schedule is a G1 violation and any team complaining can be removed from the competition.
--The judge(s) has indirect ties to teams in attendance. For example, a judge who is a high school robotics coach and who just coached the EP a year or two prior, would have indirect relationship to the EP’s teams. However, when this judge is asked if he has any relationship with any of the teams, his answer would be satisfactorily “no”.
Here is that post: