[GeeTwo]

I agree that the main question is WHY are you thinking about tryouts?

We have had tryouts for three years now. Why? In fall 2014, we had over 100 students interested in joining the team, and nowhere near enough room, tools, or other facilities for that. This year we moved into a smaller space.

We have a number of challeenges/stations for each applicant to complete over a number of sessions. Challenges are set and administered by mentors and veteran "varsity" team members. Our first year tryouts was at least three weeks long, now its down to two. Quite a few students don't finish (stop coming); those are easy. If we still have too many at the end of tryouts, we go through the score sheets. We score applicants on both abilities and attitude - in separate questions. We use the attitude scores to select the team members, and the abilities scores are mostly only used to identify targets to fill a too-small department.

It's a bit late to use our methods for FRC this year - our first tryouts were in November, but we've moved it earlier (Oct 10-22 this year) to give the team more time working together before build season. It also takes several weeks to set up the challenges before you get started.