In addition, do you feel that your region deserved more or fewer spots?
How do you figure out the skills score required to make worlds in your region?
huh? why more or less spots?
It is based on registration data and additional spots are given based on capacity anticipated for the season. Outside factors, like covid, throw this off a bit… but really are you concerned about “undeserving?” - this is about celebrating a season from all across the globe during a pandemic. There is no game play book for this.
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Singapore deserving more spots would be a perfect example. I know there is no way to fix it but there is no harm in discussing the subject.
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Go to the regional skills standings, determine which teams already qualified, and go down the list with the double qualifications.
Singapore is unable to travel to Worlds - a different situation.
[clarification - decision from ministry of Education in Singapore ]
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Please help me to understand this argument. My post has nothing to do with who can or can’t travel. Singapore was meant as an example, but there are other similar situations.
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I think my region (California - North) needed a minimum of 250 points for the Middle School skills qualification.
Literally it does - Singapore is out of play due to government restrictions… You specifically used it as an example in your post.
Singapore was meant as an example, but there are other similar situations.
I think the word “deserving” triggers a lot of us.
Suppose there are a fixed number of World’s spots, for example for VRC High School it is 800 this year. Suppose, too, that there are 8000 high school teams that competed this season (or they anticipated roughly 8000 teams).
Suppose now, that the only way to qualify for Worlds was through Skills (no previous year automatic berths, no current-year regional tournament champion, no regional judged awards, etc.). And if VRC/RECF/GDC turned into some sort of Thanos-like being, they might decide that only the top 10% from any region should go onto worlds - simple math: 800 spots for an expected 8000 teams. Suppose Singapore has 13 teams competing this season, then the Thanos-RECF would allocate 1 or 2 spots to Singapore, leading to a team with a 593 score to be the highest non-qualifying team.
Depending on your point of view, this could be “fair” or “not fair”. Certainly the score indicates the team is highly-capable.
Assume that Worlds has a fixed capacity of 800 teams for the foreseeable future. Suppose RECF were persuaded to designate some number of slots purely for Global World’s Skills. How many would you reserve? 10? 25? 50? 80? 100? What happens to teams that qualified through other means (Signature Events, Regionals, etc.) that also had one of these top scores. Does that spot go to the next-highest non-qualified ranked team? These spots would then come, necessarily, at the expense of the number of slots available to all regions. If your region had, say 12 spots this year, would you think it fair for it to be 10 spots (hypothetically) next year if it meant the Top 100 Global Skills auto-qualify?
There’s no right or wrong here. Just real-world tradeoffs. Decisions the GDC/RECF need to make, knowing that there’s always going to be some really talented team that just misses whatever the criteria are.
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Singapore can’t attend this year, but if they could attend, they would have the problem of having more highly competitive teams than they had received Worlds spots for them, which has been the case since the top 35 Skills scores stopped qualifying for Worlds.
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We scored 393 and was beat by our sister team who scored 411 and we r in middle school
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I think a lot of what is perceived as unfairness comes from situations where a region like singapore with only 3 spots, has teams they cannot bring, which are objectively more competitive than the large majority of teams who attend worlds.
The question is, should the spots be divided proportionally by team count between regions, locked to that region, and blind to the level of skill of the teams within the region? Or should the system attempt to give all 800 spots to the top 800 teams in the world somehow, regardless of region?
obviously the latter is a terrible idea, but I think some small element of it should be present, because I honestly don’t think it’s fair that all the teams of very high caliber in singapore should be denied a chance at attending worlds just because they have the misfortune to be in a region given so few spots.
Giving a select number of spots to some sort of global pool would give teams the chance to qualify regardless of their region, and skills is just about the only way to do that. Even something like 10-20 of these spots would give more top teams in small regions a way to get to worlds than would otherwise be possible
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For South Florida, it seems to have been 340, but there were 3 teams with 340 (and the same driver and programming), so one of them won it on a timestamp tiebreaker, since they got their top Skills scores in November while the other teams didn’t get theirs until late February.
If there had been one more spot, it would have been decided by one team doing their best Programming Skills run about 4 hours before their sister team did theirs, both on the same day!
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For Indiana HS, the Skills score to get into Worlds was 400.
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I think it was a bit lower than that. I believe that 323X was the last to make it with a score of 388.
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Are you California - North or California - South?
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It should always be the top teams of that region. If singapore had more teams, they would get more spots. But because they have good overall teams, that just means the teams that do go will be excellent. There are regions in the united states, like Texas that the average team would get spanked by lets say a Norcal team. Some regions in Texas will be sending very poor teams to Worlds. I think that is completely fair, each region gets to show who has the best teams, and compete with those teams.
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Texas Region 4 HS, 160. Much less than other regions mentioned in this post (SoFlorida 340, Indiana 388?).
Of course I am thankful that my friends with 160 points can go to worlds, but if that’s taking away from a Florida team that has 339 points, is that “fair”?