This year me and another one of my teammates are in an academic program that has a competition on the same date as VEX, and I’m wondering if Judges or the competition runners themselves will penalize us/not allow us to participate if only 2 of our team members are able to go.
This is our first year in this other program (UAH Mission Design, if you were wondering) and we don’t really want to miss the first trip, but also don’t want to leave our teammate high and dry if something were to happen. We worked really hard on our robot and notebook this year and would hate to have it go to waste by being disqualified or already have the Judges against us due to lack of team members. Any answer helps! Thank you.
You can go to tournaments without all of your members we have done it before and will probably do it again. They may penalize you only if you leave out their portion of the interview, ie your strategist isnt here so you dont say anything to answer the strategy based questions.
I misread this at first, I think what is important is to read the Interview Rubric carefully and the Guide to Judging. It will allow you to understand what the judging team is looking to observe. As for penalties, the rubric is a guide to key indicators to help identify top teams for various judged awards. Then they deliberate to determine who gets the award (it is not solely quantitative from rubrics - there is a recent Judging Q&A on this).