[MamaSpoldi]

I too find this removal of feedback disturbing... and their justifications sadly lacking. I also concur that the ideas mentioned so far regarding (1) feedback on the written submission which could be done once before competition as well as the idea of (2) assigning someone to serve as a "court reporter" to type up individual team feedback. These are really good and helpful ideas and if we continue working together on this topic I suspect we can come up with more.

I do have one one question that I have not heard yet...
Having judged at many FLL tournaments both local and state I am intimately familiar with their scoring rubrics and the judging process used at that level. And through that process I have learned that the perception of individuals viewing the same materials and hearing the same facts can vary widely based on their personal experience and area of expertise. Don't the FRC Chairman's judges use some sort of objective scoring system (eg. a rubric of sorts) to narrow down the field for discussion during their deliberation process? It seems to me that providing access to that score sheet at least provides some specific feedback to the team on how well their message was communicated and therefore if their presentation/submission was received as intended. Providing at least this portion of feedback seems like it would require almost no effort since these scores are being accumulated anyway. Maybe if we could combine this "low cost" rubric-like numeric scoring feedback with the somewhat off-loaded "court reporter" free-form subjective feedback, it seems like we would be doing everyone in the community a service.

Providing no feedback what so ever creates a process that lacks transparency. This can breed the appearance of favoritism and unfairness because there is no evidence refute it. This is not the culture change we are all striving for.