Lesson Learned 2016 - The Negative

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

I don't think we can rightly expect the one or two-sentence award descriptions to be exhaustive lists of all necessary-and-sufficient criteria for award eligibility.

That the awards are judged by human judges who interview teams on the spot in the pits is more or less a guarantee that awards will be determined by a huge number of factors that are not explicitly in the descriptions. Are some of these undesirable? Of course, we humans are highly imperfect creatures - like it or not, teams are probably judged, to some extent, on whether they were interviewed before or after lunch.

However, I'd contend that along with the bad comes a fair bit of good. If a judge sees members of a certain team behaving ungraciously, that judge is probably going to be less-likely to give that team an award. I think this is probably a good thing, even though plenty of the awards specify nothing about standards of team behavior.

For what it's worth, I think Andrew has been in a blue shirt at more events than I have been to events in any capacity. Opinions on award criteria availability can be discussed in this thread (and probably should) but Andrew has to train judges on criteria so I'm sure he knows a fair bit of it.