FRC Blogged - Something New – FIRST Dean’s List Changes

[Anupam Goli]

While I wholeheartedly agree with interviewing candidates, I am at odds with the decision to restrict entrance to sophomores and juniors. Like others have said, some students may not flower until their late junior/early senior year in terms of productivity and FIRST talent. Late comers may become the support beams to various teams, but would not be recognized.

That being said, I can see why FIRST wants to get colleges to value the Dean's List higher. It's not exactly a hidden truth that top tier institutes prefer to see science fair medalists, science olympiad champions, and winners of various other awards over FIRST, the reason being that while those other activities have individual winners, FIRST is a team sport, and as such, anyone can write FIRST on their applications. FIRST introduced the Dean's List initially to honor students, but there still was the problem of FIRST not being weighted as much as individual awards in academia.
FIRST is pushing the award to be given early in the student's career so they can place it on their college application, thereby giving their FIRST activity as much weight as winning the state science fair or something similar. The negative of this? We are limiting our pool of applicants and filtering out some of the higher quality applicants from the pool.

Limiting the pool of applicants might make it so students get more credit for FIRST on their college applications, but FIRST is eliminating the potential to award a more deserving person of the highest honor a FIRSTer could get.