Appropriate penalties for off-the-field ethical/behavioral violations

[Ted Boucher]

Originally Posted by Arefin Bari

We all have been saying what the penalties might be for the cheaters and also what is our opinion in general. now lets state the problem...

"What do you feel is appropriate and how should this be enforced? Who who do the enforcing and should there be any limits to the penalties." - Steve W.

few respective members said that we should penalize teams, and few other respective members said that we should just let it go, because we dont want to lose teams. most of us said that FIRST should be enforcing these and few said that there should be limits (they posted the limits that we should have). (PLEASE correct me if i am wrong).

Here is a question for all of you (it was mentioned before, but i didnt see any response)..

"How would you know if a team is cheating? and if you do know, how would you prove it?"

as I mentioned earlier in my other post, that is when "Honesty" comes into play.

-Arefin

For pre-fabricating parts before 6 weeks beings:

Honestly, I don’t think that there is any way for a FIRST official to judge this at a competition with the current rules. Unless someone for their team turned them in, which it very unlikely. What FIRST could do is have each FIRST team submit time stamped pictures of the build process of all of their major components. This way you would know when the parts was made and assembled to a limited point. If you make these pictures required to every event, then it would be a way of showing that the team did not cheat. If the dates are wrong, then we would know that they cheated. Another thing FIRST could do is making changes the KOP every year, to a point so that a team would be unable to pre-fabricate parts.

For fixing robot parts at an official FIRST Robotics Event at a hotel or such:

As I said earlier, just by watching the pits and make sure only people are leaving and entering is the simple and easy solution to the anwser. This ensures that you are not letting a team bring parts in and out of the competition that were done off building time or competition time. There would be no need for a penalty phase and everyone would be on a fair playing field. You could even seal the pit with tape after a team leaves at night. Then in the morning, a judge could make sure that they are not bringing any parts in with them and unseal the pit.