Lesson Learned 2016 - The Negative

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

Respectfully, I think it's a bit too simplistic to proclaim this as an absolute. Student involvement is important. Let's consider an extreme case: if a team showed up to competition that consisted of a handful of students who drove the robot, with literally everything else handled by the mentors, do you think that ought to have "not the slightest bit of relevance" to judged awards at all? There's a reason that the judges talk to students, not to mentors.

Now, I don't mean to imply that such a case is representative of any actual teams - but I think it illustrates, as a principle, why we can't just discard the notion that student involvement is important to whether or not a team deserves an award. I obviously can't speak to the questions that the judges you observed were actually asking, or to whether or not their judgment in the matter was reasonable - but I don't think the concept itself is necessarily wrong. It's all a matter of extent.



Now here, I agree entirely. But a student being able to professionally explain a mechanism (both in terms of operation and manufacture), what reason would the judges have to believe that the mentors did all the work?

It's not in the criteria for the awards. It's not relevant. When judges go off criteria it's always a problem because then teams don't know what they are being judged on... it's a mess.


And the reason is "because it looks too professional to be done by students"