[Kims Robot]

I have yet to see exact numbers across the nation, but from what I recall, a few of the events we looked at in working on this for NE had fewer than 30% submission rate. They have also set it up so that teams only submit their DL applicant to one event. So with many teams going to multiple events, you can probably guesstimate that each event probably has fewer than 25% of it's teams submitting. I think that works out to something like roughly 22 students to interview (if you assume a 45 team average at an event). With a 10 minute cycle (5 min interview, 5 min in/out/notes time for judges) thats 220 minutes, or 3.67 hours... So you can see that in most cases if you allocate 2 judges across a full day, there actually is plenty of time.

Now the value of talking to a student for only 5 minutes is more a question in my mind, but I believe the idea is to just get a concept of if the student really matches the essay submitted for them... or is the mentor group just a really great set of writers?

Of course I would LOVE to see the day where every team submitted two applicants, but the reality is the current numbers seem to support that adding two judges and one room to each event will yield enough time for DL interviews.