You will never know who is on the wait list, it’s not public information. I could go on right now and add teams to the wait list and take a screen shot “proving” that my team was on the wait list. It doesn’t mean that they were at the time. Your coach might have received the invitation and declined it. Unless you are an EP on the event you would never know.
Other than you, what I’ve seen makes it seem like they are using the overall skills list sorted by teams that are actually on the wait list.
Ok, honestly not really understanding what the reason is for continuing discussion about this. Ryan answered very clearly in the first reply to this thread:
So yes, it’s random. That means that the skills score doesn’t factor into the decision. So I don’t really get what the point is of trying to find as many examples as possible of teams with lower skills scores than you getting invited from the waitlist, because the skills score never mattered for the waitlist anyways.
The bigger question here IMO, is how many teams are being invited from the waitlist? I added up all the spots mentioned on the qualifying criteria, Online Challenges, and signature events, and the total spots accounted for came to about 360 for MS and 360 for ES. The capacity for MS and ES worlds is 420 teams each. So, the question is where are the remaining 60 spots per level allocated to? Are they just unallocated and thus always destined to be waitlist teams? Or is there some other qualification route that I’m not accounting for in my math? @ryanosweiler it would be great to get some clarification on this point.
The point is not to find more teams getting out of waitlist not based on performance, or purely random.
The point is that it’s really hard to understand why it ended up like this after all these teams have gone through so many rounds of rigorous competitions. Is it too hard to to pick teams from waitlist based on global skills ranking, or the other performance ranking (top tournaments or skills teams in Signature or State, top teams in Online challenges, or top teams in design or innovation, whatever can be “ranked”)
Even in this thread, people are still defending the result is performance-based and can’t be random. That’s really not the messages or values the community would expect REC to deliver.
How would skills not be random just out of curiosity? From my perspective they could just do teams on the waitlist in order from highest skills to lowest skills and if you’ve never done a skills, your illegible.
There’s about a 10% chance that my teams that got selected were random. I had 5 teams on the waitlist and the two selected had the highest skills score on the world list. That’s the only thing I know for sure. Choosing teams randomly isn’t a good value for the community either. I am glad that the better teams got the invite.
That happened in our region. One of our top teams in our region is all female and blew everyone else away. Had they actually went by merit, they would have not only one of the best teams, but as a bonus they are female.
They can say “random” all they want. That is a vague term. It would be really easy to break down the entire waitlist into subsections and choose “randomly” from each subsection. They’re not lying. They’re just not 100% transparent.
Not just that, I would like to see better management overall. Who does it benefit to just let teams in randomly? Merit is completely eliminated from the equation in order to make it to World’s.
There is in no way in any shape or form I would have my kids on that waitlist if they didn’t even make it to state or weren’t in the top 10% of skills.
When they don’t make it one year, it lights a fire under their rear to start earlier, learn more, and work harder the following season.
This applies especially if they are one of many teams within the same school system. They are devaluing the work done by their peers who got there. They all obviously had the same exact resources. Some took the hard work route. Others relied on simple luck at the end of the day.
Worlds itself is no longer an elite event and just another Vex competition when merit isn’t part of the equation for everyone to make it there. It is simply flashier and a heck of a lot more expensive than your local ones-a lot more expensive.
It’s now equivalent to all the competitive cheer and dance competitions all over the US that the girls travel to. They pay a lot more for the experience than the actual competition. It will be interesting to see if the elite STEM/academic competitions continue on the same path of sports- where “everyone wins a trophy”. Get ready to order those Josten’s championship rings!
The Elementary event still has 19 open spots past the deadline. I’m not sure why they would not fill those spots given that there are so many well qualifying teams who would like to participate.
I agree with previous comments about the lack of using skills ranking.