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Engineers or Lawyers?
Who are we mentoring here, students who want to make a difference as scientists and engineers, or students who want to be laywers splitting ethical hairs over what is "legal" and "illegal"? Maybe "Fixing" isn't the proper term, but "Collusion" is.
DEFINITION: Collusion--to act together secretly to achieve a fraudulent, illegal, or deceitful purpose; conspire.
If you agree with your partner to allow the opponents stacks to stand to increase your potential QP's that is not collusion. As soon as you begin to talk with your opponent about mutually allowing each others stacks to stand you cross the line and are guilty of collusion. You have conspired to inflate the scores of both teams regardless of who is the winner. If "Gracious Professionalism" is defined as that behavior which would make your grandmother proud, how can you tell her your robot achieved its' high ranking using secret deceitful agreements?
Inherent to any legitimate competition is a requirement to make every possible attempt to defeat your opponent. Agreements to limit the competition to a smaller subset of options reduces the legitimacy of their results. Perhaps the teams who are so proud of developing this strategy should include it in their Chairman's Award submissions in the future. We'll let FIRST decide which team behavior is considered as a role model.
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