Incentives for Chairman's submissions

[Caleb Sykes]

My team recently had to make a very interesting decision: whether to make a bad Chairman's award submission this year or to not make a submission at all. For those of you unaware of how teams qualify for the MSHSL robotics championship, here is a link to the process. At its core, it is very similar to the standard district point system introduced by FIRST last year. I am assuming that the system will remain largely the same for 2015. The difference that I would like to highlight is the 10 bonus points that teams receive for submitting for the Chairman's award. Interestingly enough, I distinctly remember someone (Jim Zondag?) stating that the reason FIRST did not include something like this in their standardized point system was so that teams were not incentivized to make poor Chairman's submissions just so that they would earn the free points, which is exactly what we are being incentivized to do because of the MSHSL's point system.

My team is growing very quickly in many areas, but we are still a year or two out from having a solid Chairman's submission. However, if we had the desire to do so, I am confident that we could throw together a sub-par submission just to get the 10 points. Were this incentive not in place, I would have encouraged our business team (who would be doing the brunt of the work on this) to expand in other areas, like submitting for the entrepreneurship award by making a solid business plan and getting more sponsors. However, with this incentive in place, I feel as though we are being told that our priorities are a bit out of whack, and should instead be shifted more toward submitting for Chairman's.

I feel that the decision we ended up making is irrelevant to this discussion (if you want to know, pm me) as I am much more interested to know what everyone thinks about the incentive itself. Should something like this be adopted into the standard district point system? Or is the MSHSL encouraging the wrong thing? Are bad Chairman's submissions any better than no Chairman's submission? What if the time spent on a Chairman's submission could have been used to get more sponsors or submit for other awards?