Quote:
Originally Posted by TDav540
IMHO, the judged awards (excluding EI and Chairman's) are weighted well enough considering the cutoff for district championships. Chairman's gains automatic entry to the next level, so the amount of points it provides is relatively irrelevant. EI could and possibly should be weighted more highly than 8 points, but at most it shouldn't be over 12 points.
At the end of the day, the District Championship and Worlds want to have the best robots in the world competing for the crown. This is NOT to say that they don't care about the judged awards: they do, especially EI and Chairman's. But since the robot construction and competition is the main attraction of students, mentors, and sponsors, it makes sense that a large majority of the field is attending because of robot quality.
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Yes winning CA at a district event gets your team and robot a spot at DCMP but once you are there you are competing for CA against an even tougher set of teams. So I would not say the 10 points earned are irrelevant since they are still a part of your total points used to determine earning a spot at CMP and since it usually comes down to a 1 or 2 point difference at the cut off point, 10 points is huge. For example places 34-39 were each separated by 1 point in the PNW this season. Yes we technically only send 32 teams but there are declines so it was down to 1 point being the deciding factor of the lowest team to qualify.