Improvements to the Dean's List. Your Ideas?

[Jared Russell]

I think that in order to talk about the "right" way to award the Dean's List, we first need to talk about the meta-issue of how ALL judged awards are handled.

We all know that FIRST is not fair. There are teams with "unlimited" budgets, dozens of world class mentors, fantastic production resources, and affluent "cream of the crop", MIT-bound (with or without FRC) students. And there are teams that struggle to register for their first event, rely on the kitbot and hand tools, have one or two dedicated mentors, and draw from some of the most challenged schools in the country. Most teams fit somewhere in between. In general, a student has little or no choice as to what team they join. It is something they are "born into".

Nobody can argue that the "have" teams can achieve objectively "bigger" things than those who "have not"...they have greater resources! They can build awesome robots each and every year, and have bandwidth for doing more community outreach at the same time. Most (but not all) Einstein teams each year come from some of the most affluent areas in FIRST. Most (but not all) Hall of Fame teams fall on the favorable side of the resource distribution curve. It is no surprise that many (but by no means all) judged awards go to a small subset of the FRC teams each season.

Of course, the counter-point is that if all of your students are already bound for prestigious colleges and successful careers, then what real impact are you making? FIRST certainly offers plenty to these students (leadership and teamwork experience, early exposure to engineering practices, and resume padding to help get into highly competitive schools), but can you really argue that it is as profound and life-changing as taking someone from a less affluent background, with little in the way of a support system and a less ambitious outlook on life, and turning them into someone who is motivated, knowledgeable, and going to be the first college-bound person in their family (for example)?

The question becomes...do you reward objective excellence in (robot design and execution, team organization, community outreach, etc.)...or do you reward huge, significant impact in the lives of students (even if the robot, organization, community outreach, etc., isn't as impressive on paper)? If "both", how do you strike a balance?

The answer, for me, to this meta-question as well as to the "Who should get a Dean's List" question is a simple measuring stick: "[Our vision is] To transform our culture by creating a world where science and technology are celebrated and where young people dream of becoming science and technology leaders." (Dean Kamen)

Changing a culture is a tricky thing. It is very, very hard to do in a targeted way. Culture is a bit of a nebulous (but fascinating) concept, but at some level it means specific "schemas" or patterns and structures of thinking about specific aspects of our world shared by a particular demographic. Culture gets reinforced and evolves over time as a result of many factors, but two of the most significant are:

(1) "Internal" experiences (experiences with <aspect of the world> at the individual, family, neighbor, daily experience level)
(2) "External" experiences (experience with <aspect of the world> at the TV, internet, public policy, arts and entertainment level)

You need to make significant impacts in BOTH areas to have ANY chance of affecting real cultural change! How fortunate that "grassroots" teams cater more to the first factor, and influential, resource-rich teams contribute more to the second! (Though this is a HUGE over simplification, and both types of teams can make significant impacts in both areas)

So in the end, my answer to the question is a bit of a cop out. There are still very hard decisions that I am sure the judges (for any award, including Dean's List) need to make that require choosing between different types of deserving teams/individuals, and I cannot come up with a hard and fast rule to help them out.

But at the end of the day, all FIRST awards are most visible to us within the FIRST community. Outsiders do not (yet) really care. Even college admissions departments are unlikely to truly understand the "pecking order" of FRC awards. So really, awards are FIRST's most visible way of saying to all of us: "Yes, this is a team/individual to emulate!", and I am saying that the "metric" (however fuzzy it may be) that should, in my opinion, weigh most heavily in this determinition is "How much cultural change is this person/team really affecting?"