[George1902]

just tossing in 2 cents...

you can divide the information you gather from a robot into 2 categories. objective and subjective

in the objective category are facts and statistics, such as:
how many goals can they control?
how many balls?
how long does it take them to empty their ball load?
how fast are they? (easy enough to measure in feet per sec with a stop watch.)
how much pulling power do they have? (*NOT* how much can they pull... i saw videos of robots towing cars last year... THAT IS NOT AN ACCURATE MEASURE OF POWER! hook a hanging scale to your robot with rope and let it drive away from you. look at what the scale reads. this is your pulling power.)
how many motors do they use to drive with?
can they shift gears?
and so on...

in the subjective category are opinions about the robot, such as:
how durable / reliable is the robot? (has it broken in matches? would it shatter if you coughed too hard on it?)
how would you rate it on a scale of 1-10?
how are their drivers?

when i send students out to scout, i try to keep the subjective questions to a minimum. i suggest we do the same when creating a standardized system. *especially* for stats like speed and power. true, these can be difficult to find out once at the competitions, but not impossible. for speed, some thing like "time to the goal at the start of the match" would have been a fine estimation of a teams speed last year... if it took one team about 3 seconds to get to the goals and another team 7 seconds, then the second team clearly needs to think of some strategy other than a mad dash to the middle goal, for example. as for power, some teams (SPAM, team 180, comes to mind) actually brought with them to the competition platforms that teams could come by and test their pulling power on.

so, a quick wrap-up... objective = good, subjective = bad
keeping the categories objective makes this system appealing to many more people