September 2023 Guide to Judging Update

Change Log from the September Guide to Judging update:

●Added clarification to “Confidentiality” and “Qualitative Judgement” principles.
●Added verbiage “Managing Conflicts of Interest.”
● Added verbiage for “Balloted Awards” – an option for the Energy and Sportsmanship awards to be decided by Event staff.
● Important notes have been moved to colored boxes for emphasis
● Excellence Award criteria has been clarified: For eligibility, teams must have both
an overall Robot Skills score and an Autonomous Coding Skills score above zero
● Added verbiage suggesting different ways of planning initial in-person interviews,
including via a schedule or sign-up system, in addition to the judge’s initiative, and
clarification on how follow up interviews should be conducted.
● Added guidance for proper steps to inform EP/REC Foundation about Code of
Conduct issues.
● Engineering Notebook Rubric: verbiage of Innovation/Originality Criteria
proficiency level descriptions slightly modified.
● Team Interview Rubric – verbiage of some proficiency level descriptions slightly
modified.
● Reformatted Excellence Award Criteria Checklist to fit two copies on a page.
● Added Innovate Award Submission Information Form to facilitate the evaluation of
the Innovate Award
● “Field Note to Judges” has been renamed “Field Note to Judge Advisor.”
● Updated “Judging Single Page Reference Sheet: Excellence Award Criteria”
● Added “Single Page Outline of the Judging Process” reference sheet.
● Added optional Sportsmanship and Energy award ranking sheets for volunteer
staff.
● Various grammatical and typographical fixes

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These updates do not appear in the front pages of Judges Guide for VRC on teams.vex.com nor teams.recf.org - when will they be pushed out?

Also, there was debate around single member teams, have there been changes to address this more clearly in September update? It would be good to know where to look for these, or are current guidance in effect to in terms of teamwork interview rubric?

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Thank you guys so much!!!

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The REC Library will be updated with the new content tomorrow morning.

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One thing I think would be nice is to show or link to those relevant updated sections in the changelog so we can see the full content of the change, instead of just the summary.

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I still can’t find the updates. I’m downloading it from Judging Resources - REC Foundation and still get the June 15 version.

find it here:

https://vrc-kb.recf.org/hc/en-us/categories/9625677270807-Judging

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Are you sure you are getting the June 15 version? When I go to the RECF Judging Resources (separately or when I follow your link) and open the pdf, it does show the Sept 1 updates on the 3rd page (although the guide itself doesn’t seem to have a date noted and it does show 06, it seems to still be the correct updated version).

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Were you able to find anything that addressed this? I’ve only had time to do a quick scan and didn’t think it really did… they also don’t seem to have updated the Q&A note about this beyond the 8/8/23 additional comment.

The PDF that you linked to appears to have been updated.

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I believe the change notes (“Slightly modified”) are really underselling the work that went into this update; the Team Interview Rubric has functionally been completely rewritten as far as I can tell.

This is the new rubric:

New Rubric

And I believe this was the old rubric (obtained from the internet archive mid June 2023):

Old Rubric

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