I've had a lot of time to think about this decision to eliminate the Chairman's Feedback Form and I have to say I'm no more pleased with it than I was when it first came out. The feedback form was the only method for teams to get any sort of official and concrete information on the strength and weaknesses of a submission. I know for 1114, the feedback forms we received over the years helped lead us to new levels of accomplishment and were a critical to our path to the Hall of Fame. Not only did they help us improve our submission, but they also helped lead our program in new directions which allowed us to come closer to our goal of achieving culture change. Judges gave us concrete examples of things we could do to help strengthen our program and we took that feedback and ran with it. It saddens me that teams are now going to miss this opportunity for feedback and growth, or at least have it limited in some fashion or another. The feedback form provided a direct path of communication between our team and the judges that has now been eliminated. In 2012 our feedback form told us that we "need[ed] to show more examples of diversity". This was an easy change for us to make to our submission, but without the feedback form we never would have known this was something we were lacking or that the judges were stressing. There was no other way of knowing this.
At its core FIRST is an educational program for students. We want to see the students learn as much as possible through their participation in the program. In the classroom the feedback loop between teachers and students via the grading process is integral to the learning experience of the students. Especially in courses that focus on writing and presenting skills, students thrive on feedback from their teachers which allow them to develop and improve their skills over time. The Chairman’s process should be no different. We’ve all witnessed numerous students evolve by being part of a Chairman’s submission. They’ve become talented writers and presenters, and used these skills to earn scholarships and job offers at the top universities and companies across the world. But by eliminating the feedback form, we’ll be depriving these students of an incomparable experience. Where else other than FIRST do students have the opportunity to get feedback on their presenting skills from executives from Fortune 500 companies and leaders in our community? The Chairman’s feedback form represents a unique facet of the FIRST® program that we should not let go of.
Consider the analogy to the classroom; imagine that students work for an entire semester on major paper and presentation. After everything has been submitted and evaluated, the teacher steps up to the front of the classroom and announces the name of the student with the best overall submission. No one else is given any grades, feedback, or comments on their work. This would leave the other students feeling slightly dumbfounded and definitely with no sense of how their work was received or what they should improve in the future.
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Originally Posted by FRC Blog
In order to provide teams with feedback that is effective and most useful, we will offer the following ways teams can get feedback for the 2015 season…
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Your team will get an extra 2 minutes in the CA room with the judges for extra presentation.
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While 2 extra minutes of presenting time will be a welcome relief for many teams, this comes at the expense of 2 minutes of question time with the judges. This means the actual interaction with the Judges, a real avenue for feedback, will be cut down to 3 minutes for teams who choose this approach. This provides even less feedback for teams.
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Originally Posted by FRC Blog
We will continue to allow a mentor into the CA interview room for silent observation.
(This is huge – what better feedback than having your mentor, who knows you so well, listen not only to what your team is saying but especially to the questions the judges are asking. These questions are the best feedback you will ever get. Your mentors know your team and are able to give you objective and accurate feedback. Please encourage your mentor to be in the room!)
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Leaving aside that the current rules only allow you have a mentor in the room at the expense of a presenting student, I don't think this is a particularly useful avenue for feedback. By the time of the actual presentation, the mentor will have seen the presentation over a hundred times. They have had plenty of opportunity to offer feedback. Yes, this gives them a chance to give the presenters feedback on how they answered the questions, but that's all. The mentors don't know and understand the Chairman's criteria they way the judges do, their feedback is just conjecture based on their best understanding of the award. For younger teams who are new to this process, that level of understanding can be tenuous at best. Regardless, this only addresses the presentation. Where's the feedback on the essay coming from? Yes teams can have the essay read by teachers and mentors, but that's still not going to help them understand what the judges are looking for.
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Originally Posted by FRC Blog
And take advantage of the increased opportunity to get real-time feedback from your judges and feedback from each other.
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I fail to see how removing the feedback form and allowing teams to present for longer at the expense of the question period has increased the opportunity for real-time feedback from the judges. In fact, I think it's pretty clear that there will be substantially less room for feedback this season.
Giving proper feedback takes time. I fully understand that our judges are volunteers who are extremely busy. With some events having upwards of 40 Chairman's Submissions, giving feedback to all teams based on their entire submission must be an incredibly time consuming and difficult process. It is definitely asking a lot of the judges to have to complete these forms. At the same time the Chairman's Award is FIRST's most prestigious and important award. If we're going to hold this award as high as we do, and expect teams to hundreds if not thousands of people-hours into their efforts and submissions, I don't think it's too much to ask that they still receive a short feedback form that summarizes their strengths and weaknesses. If the check box rubric is too rigid and quantitative for tastes of some, then do away with it. Go with free form text boxes for strengths and weaknesses. It's still essential that teams get back some comments from the judges to help them know how to improve, not just when it comes to Chairman's submissions, but also in their own personal development of their writing and presenting skills.
If the workload is the issue, perhaps we can remove the expectation that feedback forms be handed back at the end of the event. Perhaps they can be emailed to the teams a few days after the event. Maybe we could have one person just do feedback on the essay (which could be done long before the event and only done once a season), and one person do feedback on the presentation. Thereby splitting and lessening the load on the feedback writers. I'm sure as a community we could come up with numerous ideas to streamline this process.