It’s not that the judging process is flawed, but that opening up that process and giving teams rubrics or any other feedback will ultimately leave people with an incomplete picture of the process. People will then fill in the gaps with conjecture. Unlike a teacher who is giving feedback to a student so they can improve their work on a personal level, judges at these events are ranking teams over each other and there isn’t a one on one relationship, which is needed for constructive feedback.
Perhaps I expressed myself badly - judging necessarily involves some degree of subjectivity. Is it a good idea to put that on display to be second guessed by the teams who are the subject of the judging? Teams that may have strong emotions from the events of the day? Is this productive, or a recipe for misconstrued conclusions?
I think it is far better than teams see who won an award, and they can then compare their work to the team that won, and gain feedback by self-reflection, than to simply compare rubric scores and feel cheated that they didn’t earn the points that they “should have” earned. Teams also should not be able to see how they rank with one another with regards to these awards - it only can serve to incite bitterness as teams dispute their award scoring and cry “favoritism” for other teams.
I cannot speak for anything beyond my own province., but at the events I organize in NJ, judges are vetted and generally come from sources outside the host school or program, and come from multiple sources - specifically to avoid conflicts of interest. Judges all get very specific instructions on sharing what goes on in the judging rooms and I personally collect judging materials to destroy. As far as I can discern, there is no collusion between judges and teams. Some programs tend to earn certain awards not due to any bias, but because they have made those awards part of their institution - some programs consistently have great engineering notebooks - built on a history of having good notebooks and also a team culture promoting the notebook as a vital part of the process.
We also have teams that tend to do well in robot performance and not on earning awards. Some teams ignore aspects of the competition to focus on the robot. That is their prerogative, but I think they are missing out on the full experience that IQ has to offer.
If you have some kind of issue with the way judging is managed in your area, you should bring it to the attention of your regional support manager. What you are describing is an unethical practice and I’m sure the REC Foundation would want to hear about it.