Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris is me
Without naming any names or places, this isn't true. At least one regional had a rookie team that didn't know they were supposed to stop building. Another team at another event unbagged longer than allowed. In one particular case, a team blatantly modified their robot after ship date.
|
I have also encountered a few probable instances of deliberate violations of the hands-off rules. Large-scale violations are probably not widespread, but they give a huge advantage to the teams that are tempted to cheat.
I don't think there's much overhead involved in submitting a few photos to FIRST on ship day. Anyone with an cellphone and an e-mail account could do this.
And if FIRST wanted to physically verify a couple teams, that would have a strong deterrent effect: either the teams would have to plan their cheating around a possible visit, or when the school administration learns of the visit, they'll have to explain why they're hurriedly stuffing the robot into a bag. This has a fair bit of overhead for FIRST volunteers, but on the scale of a couple non-randomly-selected teams per regional, it's quite doable.
It's not my intention to be burdensome, but the honour system isn't really enough to prevent teams from bending rules. They come up with all sorts of justifications for their transgressions, but inevitably it comes down to the idea that they're ignoring an implicit resource constraint that is supposed to apply equally to all teams, as a core tenet of the competition. I think FIRST is right to draw a bright line on ship day, because, as you said, it's just a competition, and the ideal alternative from the perspective of a team—equitably assessing who deserves more time—is incredibly difficult.