Could you please help clarify how the Excellence Award for Middle School Vex IQ was determined at World?
Excellence has a minimum threshold of Top 40% in all robot performance categories. The Excellence Award winner was at 50% in Teamwork (41st out of 82).
Not looking for or suggesting any reversal, but wanted to point it out. If it was overlooked, I hope that RECF Judging Committee would look into what and how this happened.
I would also like to express concerns about judging of notebooks and a loophole in notebook submission that can be exploited.
Would you please consider implementing a way to keep a history of notebooks submitted by teams every time they attend a tournament?
The idea is that judges should be able to see how a team’s notebook has evolved from their first competition to their last. This will prevent potential notebook submissions that were back-edited or fully reconstructed right before a big tournament like the State Championship and World. I believe that this loophole is a major contributor to the inconsistency in judging between events.
Because EP’s are also coaches with multiple teams of their own, and to avoid conflicts of interest, the notebook submission history should only be visible by RECF with temporary viewing by judges at events only for teams attending. To better safeguard everyone’s notebooks, maybe the viewing window at events can be restricted to the event hours.
I understand that time is a limiting factor. Judges do not have to look at historical data for all teams, but at least for those that are contenders for awards that move on, like Excellence.
It seems you are right about the team not meeting the requirement for excellence. The official guide says, “At the conclusion of Qualification Matches, the team is ranked in the top 40% of teams* at the event in Qualification Match rankings.” The team should’ve ranked within top 33, but the team that won excellence ranked 41 out of 82 teams in the Opportunity division. Even if you look at the other divisions, with their average score of 239.25, they would’ve ranked 46th in Innovate, 34th in Spirit, 37th in Research, and 38th Design.
Maybe the RECF judges figured that with 90% of the IQ teams at Worlds using nearly identical robots, the vast majority of teams had already ignored G4, specifically the recently added clause about not copying designs. Perhaps they determined that the Excellence Award winner had NOT competed with a derivative design like almost everyone else. If they DQed all of the clone 180s, the Excellence Award winner was actually in the top 5% of scoring.
One of my biggest gripes is that the rules aren’t enforced. Wish it was true that they DQ’ed! However, if RECF judges had, this team would have been DQ’ed because they also had a 180 bot.
This team attended 2 Signature events and I have first hand accounting witnessing this team in competition at one of them. At that Sig event, the Excellence winner was praised for being original; they received a judged award in their Div at World which aligns. In contrast, although the Sig Event handed out all judged awards, the World Excellence Award team did not receive any of them. It was a similar result at their other Sig Event; this team did not qualify for any judged award. The Excellence winner there went on to receive a judged award in their Div at World which again makes sense. The judges at World were aligned with the Sig judges in recognizing these two teams.
It was a red flag however when I saw that the team that received Excellence at the World level. So I looked into it a bit and posted about it.
Because something just felt off, I looked into the results a second time, and realized this team didn’t meet the robot performance requirements. This is the one important threshold that makes the Excellence judged award impressive; a student-centered robot design that is also competitive enough on the field.
If no team met the Excellence requirements, the guide to judging states that the Excellence award does not have to be given.
Something is definitely off, and it is worth RECF’s time to fix it before next season begins.
Please read the game manual. You clearly do not understand what G4 means, and you have misinformed many people in the past. G4B and G4Bi state that it is 100% legal to use a design that you have seen online, as long as the team’s build is not the same as the design that they took inspiration from. This is made incredibly clear in the manual, yet coaches such as yourself who have no idea what building and competing is like constantly spread misinformation.
G4B - Teams may be inspired by designs by other Teams, and use an idea from someone else to spark innovation
G4Bi - Using elements of another design as a starting point is acceptable if the Team is capable of demonstrating evidence of iteration, innovation, and/or modification that makes the design uniquely their own
I understand that vex iq has a cheating problem, but you heavily exaggerate the statistic in your post.
There is not a single criterion for the excellence award that states that winning teams cannot use the same archetype as another. Additionally, there could not have been so many true clones that a team that didn’t meet the criteria won excellence.
Dean, we had a competition with this same exact team, and they had a 180 bot. And at states we heard that they had a 180 bot. And it looks pretty similar to all other 180’s I’ve seen.
This is not how judges awards work, at least on the VEX level. In the judges room, judges are constantly creating lists of deserving teams for each award as they interview. Then they shift and adjust. Sometimes because of match play or skills results. Sometimes because a team can only win one award, so they might shift from one award list to another because a different team needs to slide into the list where they previously were. And then second interviews happen. Which can cause more shifting. It’s a constant cycle of ranking, shifting and adjusting. There’s no “qualifying” for a judged award. And remember—as previously discussed—different judges judge differently. We all get the point, mostly, I think. You don’t need to keep tilting at this windmill.
I don’t think it’s more special necessarily. But Sigs are more diverse and typically more challenging than most local events as the capacity is greater and teams come from different parts of the US and Canada. The Sig events are also well run compared to local ones, at least from our team’s experience of the ones we’ve been to. The kids on our team also rate the judges at the Sigs as a much better interview experience.
In this case, I used the 2 Signature events this team competed at because the same Excellence winners from those events were also at World. I am making a correlation between the judges at the 3 events (2 Sigs and World) and how they judged similarly when encountering the same two Excellent teams from the Sigs.
However, the team that won Excellence at World is an anomaly; although the World judges recognized the Sig Excellence winners worthy of judged awards as well, similar to the judges at 2 Sig events, somehow they differed in opinion when it came to the team at World and rated them at the highest level to award them Excellence.
The difference isn’t small; from not earning any judged awards by measure of two sets of judges at Sigs to winning the highest level possible at World.
Since the Excellence winner is picked from the top contenders for the Design award that supposed to have met the top 40% requirement, we can deduce that this team was a contender for Design with a top engineering notebook. The same notebook that the 2 Sig judges decided was not strong enough to win any awards; yet is the best at World. I’m on repeat here, but even if the team improved their notebook after January, the notebook as it was until then shouldn’t have improved. This is why I suggested that RECF keep historical data of notebook submissions at each competition so judges can compare and see the progression.
Yes, agree that it keeps shifting as teams get interviewed and get added to the ranking for a particular award. And yes, no team can receive two awards.
If the word “qualify” is the hangup. I can see how that can be misunderstood.
How about "this team did not rank high enough in any judged award category to receive one "
The most important part of this post is that at the highest level of competition, World, the team that was selected for the highest award did not meet the requirements. I believe if anything comes out of this alone, I hope RECF investigates and figure out where it went wrong and make it so the result is better next year.
I will say you are going on the same rant of signature events over and over and since you will probably continue to do so I will let you know that the team did not turn in their notebook for judging and went to those signature events mostly for robot testing at a competitive level. You should really try asking instead of assuming and I think many people will agree you just gotta move on.
So this team competed at a local competition in November, submitted a notebook because at their local event, it looks like they won Excellence.
They proceeded to then “only practice” by attending 2 Sig events with a 3-5X more expensive registration plus travel cost and hotel cost where if a team actually wins Excellence could go straight to World.
Afterwards they go to their State championship, clearly submitting a notebook for a chance at World, since this is how they qualified. So they didn’t want to risk going to World by way of the Sig events?
Sure, if I hadn’t been a coach long enough, I guess I could buy that, but I clearly do not.
The bigger issue here is that this team did not meet the requirements at World period.
Again, I’m not looking for a reversal, I am hoping for RECF to make their process better so this does not happen again.
Most teams actually budget and fundraise just to make it to World, and they all deserve better. Not all teams can spend the money to just practice at a couple of Signature events.
Right now you just sound like you think your team should have gotten excellence, and your trying to nitpick and say you technically won becuase the other team didn’t deserve it
