[Nemo]

I had a chance to referee an FLL event this year and thought the conferences at the end of the matches were great. The teams and referees go through the scoring chart and verify that it's right at the end of each match. Teams walked away from the matches knowing what deductions were made and what they got credit for, and the students corrected my inevitable mistakes.

I do think it would be worth exploring options for correcting human errors that are bound to occur. I would entertain the option of an FLL style conference at the end of a match to let the teams verify the scoring. That could correct simple numerical errors such as, for example, assigning points to the wrong alliance for end game. Something like that swings a match, and with the current system there's no recourse if mistakes like that happen. It's unnecessary for it to be that way. For some types of errors, it would be an easy discussion and both sides would agree that the points went to the wrong alliance. In some scenarios, I could picture a team clarifying a penalty and admitting that "actually we did XYZ, it wasn't the other alliance." And realistically, sometimes the alliances will disagree and they'll have to just accept what the head referee says like we have now. At least they'd hear the reasoning straight from the ref. "I called a G99 because you did ABC." I'm not proposing a solution to those judgment situations, because human judgment by referees is going to have to take care of those. BUT, I do think a quick conference could help with an error that everybody agrees was an error, and then it can just be resolved quickly and without a bunch of bad feelings.

I am not offering any opinion on whether the scenario in this year's controversial match was an obvious error or not. I am just musing on a process change that I think could help to catch certain human errors and improve the integrity and positive experience of the competition.

It would be a tricky balance, because you'd have some people pushing the limits of grace and professionalism while other people would find a decent balance between competitiveness and respecting the volunteers and the process.

Maybe I'm wrong and this would put undue stress on volunteers. There seems to be an idea that revealing the scoring breakdowns would be bad for volunteers. But I think that would be a welcome bit of transparency, and I think it's unfortunate that currently there's no mechanism for identifying and correcting mistakes that naturally happen occasionally.