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#1
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Re: Judge Consistency Between Events
Especially with a rookie award how hard is it to go down a list of all of the rookies in attendance. There's never too many of them. That way stuff like "you weren't mentioned" doesn't happen.
One thing I recommend is to specifically try not to be forgotten. Say something that's wows them and leaves them thinking of you. |
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#2
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Re: Judge Consistency Between Events
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The "Robot Design Judging Pre-Tournament Preparation Pack" I received this year did not contain the word "advocate" or any phrasing like it. It had plenty of information about the mechanics of the judging process but only had two sentences about the deliberation process and some boxes that say "Determine Top Teams Seen by Each Pair" and "Review and Discuss Top Teams" that only imply that the Judges should advocate for the teams that they saw. Perhaps a short video might be appropriate since the document I received was already 34 pages long. It can also cover concepts such as "Gracious Professionalism" and "the kids do all the work (in FLL)" that may not be familiar to the volunteers who are sometimes being trained on the day of the competition and have not had time to have seen these concepts before. Quote:
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For full disclosure, the mentors for the OP's team left our team, on good terms, to help a local school start a new team. They (and 3847) very graciously allowed us to work at their facilities when the school we normally work at was closed for Spring Break. We celebrated Bag and Tag with them. You see their facility in our reveal video and the reveal video for another well established Houston area team. It is very likely that we would not have done as well this season if they had not allowed us to test our robot at their facility. I do not feel that our relationship is coloring my views about the inconsistencies in judging at these events. There is now another thread in a similar vein. Last edited by philso : 11-04-2016 at 15:50. |
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#3
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Re: Judge Consistency Between Events
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■ This team seems like a “Chairman’s Award team in the making.” (Community activities, leadership, vision, spirit, etc.) ■ The team is a true partnership between school or organization and sponsors. ■ The team understands what FIRST is really trying to accomplish – realizes that technical stuff is fun, challenging, and offers a future. ■ This team has built a robot appropriate to the game’s challenges. What you are describing, to me, is the Highest Rookie Seed Award, which I assume they won if they were the highest ranked rookie. The Rookie All-Star, from my understanding (and the Awards section of the manual), is more of a rookie version of the Chairman's Award. (I wasn't at the event, obviously; I just looked this up to find out whether Rookie All-Star was that different at a regional than at our district events.) |
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#4
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Re: Judge Consistency Between Events
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I agree and with there being 11 rookies at Lone Star, we accounted for that and thought we would be able to stand out. The rookies in attendance also did their best to stand out too so I'm sure the judges didn't have an easy job either. Quote:
Rookie Inspiration - 6133 Rookie All-Star - 5892 Last edited by Xavbro : 11-04-2016 at 17:08. Reason: typos suck |
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#5
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Re: Judge Consistency Between Events
First congratulations to you as a team. You are an up and coming star and with the enthusiasm that you are displaying you should be very successful.
After 10 years I have come to one conclusion. If you base the success of your team on winning awards, you will have a tough time. If you base the success of your team on meeting your team goals (as long as the goals are not we want to win award "x") you will be far better off. Those goals should include inspiring your students and giving them pride in what they accomplish. Our team has a 10 year history and I can honestly say that having inspired students and active and committed mentors lead to the best rewards. That is what being in FIRST is about. Blue banners and trophies are pretty cold, teamwork, camaraderie, loyalty, gracious professionalism are the marks of success and those lessons last forever. I know this may sound corny but that is what it is really about. We love to compete... we love to do our best... we love to celebrate each other's accomplishments.... that is why students keep coming back and that is why this endeavor will change lives. Keep at it... you guys are already an All Star.... you don't need a trophy or anyone else's opinion when you know who you are. Woodie Flowers once said: "I'm not going to tell you all that you all are winners. At this point you are smart enough to know whether you are or you aren't." Woodie is smart, listen to him....:0) Good luck and we hope to see you on the field sometime. Last edited by Bob Steele : 11-04-2016 at 17:03. |
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#6
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Re: Judge Consistency Between Events
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Highest Rookie Seed is described as "Celebrates the highest-seeded rookie team at the conclusion of the qualifying rounds" and is selected by "Robot Performance", not the Judges. This is a non-subjective award and the OP's team could not have won this award at Lone Star since they were ranked below the rookie team that did win that award. Probably, the only thing the Judges have to do with this award is high-fiving the winners and possibly helping to write the script for introducing them. What you have quoted is from Section 6.14.4 which is specifically for the Rookie All-Star Award. I noticed that the section of the Admin Manual on Non-Submitted Judged Awards (6.11) does not really say how the Judges are supposed to collect the information on the teams. It also does not say that the Judges have to collect information on all the teams. I would hope that this is in the training material that the Judges are given since there is no schedule for the teams to meet with the Judges that I am aware of. If it isn't clear how and when teams are supposed to communicate their efforts and accomplishments to the Judges, it will lead to a lot of frustration. |
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#7
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Re: Judge Consistency Between Events
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Last edited by angelah : 11-04-2016 at 23:57. |
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#8
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Re: Judge Consistency Between Events
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I can, rather freely explain the general process that goes into judging though. [1] Most of this could easily be gleaned by a careful observer, for other things I'm going to be intentionally vague. Training Pit Interviews Short List --- I tend to add a another round of Pit Interviews and Short Listing just to get another set of eyes on everyone More Detailed Interviews Deliberations [2] Award Script Writing - NO FREAKING POEMS I'll work on seeing if I can get a more detailed walk through of the process added to the manual for next year[3]. I don't want the process or what Judges are looking for to be a mystery. Here's another fun piece of info for you, that deliberations stage is the single hardest part of judging. Know why? Because there's only a handful of awards and number of teams >>> num of awards. Spoiler - we want to give every team an award. Heck [4] worked with a judge who had only heard stories of how awesome FIRST was from Jess [5], she came in and judged at Dartmouth. Well, guess what? her company NOW sponsors a team. Just from talking to students. Look, I wanna make judging as transparent as possible. I want teams to feel they understand what went into an award decision. But I've been on the other side of someone leaking info from a Judge room. I argued for team B to win over team A. Team A found out... only they only heard "he was arguing against giving you the award". Long story short - it was a crappy experience, I stopped volunteering for a while, nearly quit FIRST it was so crappy. It HAS to be a protected space so that judges can argue without fear of repercussions. I'm not trying to keep the process a secret, only the details. I'll close with some tips on how to maximize chances of getting a judged award. - Read https://frcdesigns.com/2015/07/21/5-...n-more-awards/ Kristine is a former Judge Assistant, current Event Chair, and generally awesome person. - Be prepared, know the award criteria, know what you want to win. Ok, you built some baller vision processing code? Sell the crap outta it, and don't be shy. Go into details! Did you have an issue with a particular filter not working that you worked around? Talk about it. Just remember - some of the judges don't know as much as you do. Explain it to them like they are 5. Plus, that demonstrates you know it. - Listen to what they are asking you. If the judge is asking about your intake mechanism and you start talking about your FLL teams you are wasting everyone involved's time. Now, if you work in "well, our intake was actually based on the intake our FLL team did last year, I was a mentor on the team. We thought back to that problem and .... " That's bonus points right there. Because now the judge has in their mind that not only is it cool, but when they are discussion RAS/EI they can go "wait, they learned from that and it impacted their performance as a team" THAT is a cool memorable story. - Have cool memorable stories. How much time do you spend with judges? Ok, now realize they talked to 10 other teams that afternoon. They are overwhelmed with feet per second, shot percentages, OPR, or whatever other technical details. These are people. Talk to them like people. You know what? You have a cool story, you have a favorite part of the bot. Talk about it. - Don't hand them a binder of crap. A) they have to carry it the rest of the day B) They have to worry about getting it back to you C) Dude, distill this to something I can understand quickly. You know what, it's great you have a record of every shot for any given parameter of your shooter, really, that's cool. But distill it down to an NBA style shot map and it'll stick in the mind a lot better than tables of numbers. - Talk to them like human beings. No, seriously, MOST judges are just normal folks at the end of the day [1] Caveat - every JA runs things slightly differently. I'll point out where I differ from what I've seen most folks. There's a lot of good reasons room processes differ but the biggest one is that each group of judges is different. [2] This is the part I refer to as "chair throwing time" [3] I don't make the rules, I just make a lot of noise and sometimes things change [4] And this happened outside the judge room so I can tell this story! [5] Who is STILL totally at fault for 2Champz /s |
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#9
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Re: Judge Consistency Between Events
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Once the judging process appears to be unfair, the awards associated with that process cease to be incentives. That undermines the objectives of an otherwise great program and the efforts of people in this community such as the OP, you and I. Rightly or wrongly, there have been whole teams that have left FLL in our area because of awards that were not given out in a rational and transparent way. Having worked as an FLL Judge quite a few times, I know what you mean about throwing chairs. Sometimes, the Judges get about as passionate advocating for the teams they saw as the teams themselves (I think this is a good thing)It would be greatly appreciated if you can help improve the manuals and other materials used to train the Judges. Not being a mystery to the competitors would also mean it would be easier for the Judges to be consistent from one event to another and within an event. |
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#10
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Re: Judge Consistency Between Events
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I can assure you that the #1 goal of every JA in FRC is to ensure that every team has a positive experience that they feel was fair. Comments like those judges made undermine that. |
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#11
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Re: Judge Consistency Between Events
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#12
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Re: Judge Consistency Between Events
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Here's an example. I've judged in FLL a couple of times. There was a team that was being considered for the Champions Award. Someone noted that the team wasn't nominated for any of the Project awards; does that indicate they were not a well-rounded team? I mentioned that they were on our short list but not at the top and so they weren't mentioned before. They were good; it's just that there were others that were better. |
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#13
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Re: Judge Consistency Between Events
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I vaguely recall a webinar floating around perhaps it was IL specific. This is the crappy part, is that judging has significant effort involved. There's a document, video and webinar that you have to go through. Then the day of the event, you show up early and have a few extra hours of training. Then you rush through the judging in one day. As someone who's brand new to FIRST...this is a tough position to fill in. Quote:
First-time Judges: There's unfortunately no way around some percentage of first-time Judges. The solution, specifically for Illinois FTC, is two-fold
No Real Interest: The only way around this is to up our volunteer coordination game. The goal with this is to try and recruit judges at the right time. For Illinois FTC, this just means ensuring our Event Coordinators know this, and it has been getting better. For FRC as far as I can tell, the JA for Midwest Regional seemed really prepared a few months out. Shy Judges: Illinois FTC's way of solving this, is to have well trained Judge Advisors. Ensuring equitable deliberation time and moderating the conversation is the role of the JA. They should bring out as much information as they can. BUT they also need to do it quickly and efficiently (a really hard thing). So we have state-trained JAs (just like FRC has HQ-trained JAs) to make sure we get them communicating about their experiences. Quote:
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For 1) we only have anecdotal evidence, with very many unknowns and a lack of perspectives. In addition, winning awards should not be the end-all for teams. There are probably other team issues that need fixing too. Frankly, what is broken in the Judge Room (at many events) is 2), there's a constant strain on volunteer pool (in some regions), a lack of volunteers, and a lot of last-minute judges. It's why I'm imploring OP to become a judge. Not only will we get closer to solving 2), but we'll also get more perspectives for 1). I honestly see no resolution to this particular case. In my view, OP is probably a tired mentor (long season...) and got bummed out his students got bummed out. It sounds like his team worked really hard and was a great rookie contender, and got beat out. It also sounds like his team is going to be striving to kick even more butt in the second year. This is the best resolution I can foresee. His team got beat out by great teams, and he's going to motivate his students to work hard. Since I still advocate for solving 2), I also hope he takes my advice and tries to judge or convinces others to judge. |
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#14
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Re: Judge Consistency Between Events
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Please be aware that the awards are also used to generate support, financial and otherwise, for the teams from their schools and sponsors, whether or not the team members are truly motivated by those awards. Yes, being able to recruit more Judges (and other volunteers) and retaining them would make everyone's experience much better, including the Judges and volunteers. Being able to recruit and retain volunteers is a problem that FIRST, like many other volunteer driven organizations, must solve. |
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#15
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Re: Judge Consistency Between Events
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