[Dale]

Teams that have won have tended to do a very good job of documenting their accomplishments with thank you letters, event invitations, photographs, media clippings... in fact, I would tend to say that for true RCA contending teams the issue is not one of "how do we embellish our accomplishments", but rather one of "which ones do we leave out" due to space and time limitations. We have never been in need of "fact checking" due to the documentaiton provided by teams, but do go through the top few applications with a fine-toothed comb. I can't speak for my colleages on the panel, but if a team were found to be playing fast-and-loose with the truth it would be a quick and easy way to eliminate them from contention.

I'm delighted to hear that the judges in Seattle take their duties so seriously. I'm not sure all regionals Chairman panels dig into the claims made by their top contenders or even how they would do that for out of the area teams. Just the suspicion by students that some claims are exaggerated is reason enough, in my opinion, to let the sunlight in.

Hopefully the Chairman's award is really about what you do in your community, not how you communicate what you do in ten minutes. Teams worried about having their writing style copied are worried about the wrong things.