Judge Consistency Between Events

[popnbrown]

Originally Posted by Xavbro

To your point about making sure the kids learn and work hard, that's the main principle of our team.

Good! I'm glad. If the students seem disappointed remember to re-point them to kicking more butt next season, and then play a game of charades.

Also, I would love to judge. I just love mentoring too much.

I don't mean judging at a FRC event but perhaps FTC or FLL. I was initially more involved in FTC and FLL before I began mentoring my current team, and since FIRST Fever is a real thing, my responsibilities in the other programs still exist, now it's just a team activity. We take 2 Saturdays off during Build Season to go volunteer at FTC events! The beauty of it, is I get to mentor my students in being great volunteers!


Now for the meat:

My intentions of this thread were to generate a discussion (which it has) on how can we make the judges jobs easier and make it where if you go to an event, the judging feels the same from event to event

Judges job easier would be if there were less qualified teams out there...unfortunately that's also counter to what we want, plus it makes the judges job more boring. As for the emphasis part, that's a loaded phrase. What if there are different teams at events? What if you've already won an award at an event? What if your main student lead got sick for that event? There are so many variables that "making" it the same is incredibly difficult. Frankly, not even the robot game for your team is the same from event to event. Your drive team is more experienced, the rules are more fleshed out.

I understand what you're trying to get at, but the fundamental problem is you're seeking to make a subjective process more objective. It's a hard transition. The way FRC controls this is by training. Judge Advisors are all trained by HQ and Judges are all trained by HQ-trained-Judge-Advisors.

This discussion becomes really difficult at this point, neither of us know what training involves. We haven't been through the process of FRC judging. Frankly we don't even know what the judges at each event you went to thought. We're going to get down to anectodal evidence of one perspective. If we were to have an honest and complete discussion, I think we really owe it to figure out all perspectives before trying to change how things are done.

Again, I have to implore that you have to try being a judge to really see what the process is. With the expansion of districts, it's also something I have to try to be honest.

Do you have any specific proposals in mind? I wish I could even say which were adopted and which were not. But if you do have any, I'd propose sending them to frcteams@usfirst.org or perhaps if you can get in touch with your local planning committee and the Judge Advisor there.