Qualitiative Scouting

[chandrew]

Originally Posted by robochick1319

The problem I have always had with qualitative scouting is that two people watching the same robot might have different definitions of variables like speed, accuracy, effectiveness.

This is the exact issue we have had with qualitative data. In he past when we have put qualitative sections in our scouting sheet, we have gotten a wide range of very good data mixed with students messing around and hugley varied opinions.

While our team always tries to incorporate qualitative data such as driver skill level and speed, we focus on quantitative. When our team analyzes our data we also calculate standard deviation in addition to our other metrics which helps account for quantitative data discrepancies. In addition, having our scouts watch other regionals has also helped with our quantitative data collection. This year we are fairly confident that we can record everything except the number of balls scored low which we are going to substitute for "low cycles."

Basically while in our experience qualitative data can be valuable, words are far more subjective than numbers.