Mentor/Student Involvement Philosophies

[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by Cory

This is a contentious topic because it's constantly presented as a straw man where teams have "teams of engineers building their robots" and students just driving it. This is not reality. In reality the teams (like 254) who get called out under that logical fallacy are trending towards or past 50% mentor/student work breakdown, not 99% mentor, 1% student.

If someone claims that a specific team is "a team of engineers building a robot and students driving it," then that is an obnoxious and likely incorrect claim, yes.

However, it often seems on Chief Delphi that people treat any mention of student/mentor workload issues as if this were being claimed. These threads would not become so inflammatory without problems on both sides. In reality, this is a complicated issue and there are reasonable arguments to be made either way. The manner in which people usually post about it here does not usually reflect that.

It is very easy to argue against a caricature of a point rather than the point itself. This happens on both sides of this discussion with alarming regularity.