[Jacob Bendicksen]

I'm still ruminating here, so this might be a little disjointed. Bear with me, if you will.

I think any Chairman's submission, even a bad one, will help the team in some way. Submitting for Chairman's is a fantastic way to identify the areas where your team is doing well and those in which you're not, and even a poorly written submission will do this for you. Now, a poorly written submission might not win you anything (well-written ones often don't win), but as long as your team understands what you wrote, it'll help you understand your strengths and weaknesses.

However, there is the fact (as I understand the system) that a Chairman's submission written the night before it's due will earn a team the same amount of points that a submission worked on for months will. This isn't fair to the teams that spend months and months working on theirs, but I don't know if there's a good way to tell the difference without reading them.

So, yeah, it's great for teams to submit, but it's not fair to the teams that put a lot of work in when they get as many points as a team that wrote it the night before. I don't know how we can reward the teams that put more work in, but there's gotta be a way.

Hang on. Now that I think about it, there is a reward for those teams: winning a Chairman's Award! Though even the teams that didn't win often put a lot of work in... Perhaps rewarding the teams that present at an event would be better?