[BigJ]

After giving it a go this season and discussion with the team we preferred the feedback forms, mainly because we didn't use the mentor-in-room for a number of reasons.

We realized before the presentation that having a mentor observe would only add an "harder" step of guessing:

2014: Present -> Feedback Form -> Attempt to discern what more the judges wanted -> Improve presentation for next regional/year
2015: Present -> Mentor listens -> Mentor attempts to discern how presentation/answers could improve by trying to "read judges" -> Improve presentation for next regional/year

Most of the improvements a mentor would see outside of "reading the judges" would be presentation flow, answers to questions, etc that we had been practicing and working on for weeks already (in our opinions). There wasn't a lot there that would become "newly apparent" to us. I can't imagine a situation where the mentor would be able to glean more than the students in how the presentation/answers could be improved, but then again we didn't send a mentor in.

Between the 2 reasons above, concerns about the viewing mentor being able to keep a straight/neutral face through the presentation (if a line were missed or question were flubbed) as to not affect it, and other assorted issues, we decided to let the presenters go in the room and do their thing without the additional pressure.

I think they could do away with the giant however-many category rubric (those never helped us anyway) and just have a few short written feedback questions like the ones in previous years..

Flexible presentation/question time was good. We aimed to have max time available for Q&A, but not having to hit 5:00 on the relative dot was much better for us this year.