**FIRST EMAIL**/Judges Information for the Team Yearbook

[Ben Mitchell]

Originally Posted by Amanda Morrison

I really fail to see how many, if not most, of the questions included should matter to the judges when making their choice. A few of them even offended me, to be honest. Come on, take your pick: asking about the free/reduced lunch statistic of our schools and asking about the ethnicity and gender of our students REALLY turned my head. What could the judges possibly be using these for? What decision would be made by these criteria?

I concur.

I think that those fields are completely irrelevant to judging. My dad was a judge at the NJ regional for three years, and there were a few judges who wanted to hand out awards based on pity and background (and pretty uniforms, and shiny metal parts). They had to be gently reminded what the purpose of having awards are about. I asked my dad about this and he said that as of 2 years ago, he never saw TIMS information passed to judges, but that doesn't mean it does not happen now or at other regionals. He hasn't been a judge for a few years now, so things may have changed. The whole "All information is optional. However, you will stand a better chance at impressing the judges if you fill in all the information." doesn't sound good, as it is implied that the information will be passed on to judges.

This is what I told the students on my team: it's better to lose every single match, and earn every point, even in vain, than it is to win every award and match without earning it. I know it's a cliché, but awards should be earned, and not given. Even asking for that information goes beyond the scope of what judges need to know. Teams should be judged by their merits, not their demographics. I don't like playing the GP card, but a part of being a professional is being judged on the quality of your work and your ethical integrity. Race and free lunch vouchers shouldn't factor into it.

I think this information is entirely irrelevant to judging. Moreover, it puts the validity of the awards in question for ALL teams. How would we know if a team's ethnic makeup factored into an award. It puts the validity of the process in doubt.

Also, a team's budget is NOT a good tie-breaker for what team is more deserving of an award. Good design and engineering doesn't need to have a big price tag. However, doing something on a small budget should NOT be a part of the awards process, not because doing something on a budget is not difficult and deserving of recognition but because the term "budget" is so vague since high-cost fabrications, materials, and labor can be 'donated' by sponsors.

Two teams doing the same thing with different amounts of money cannot be properly measured due to the reasons stated above. As a result, the figure is meaningless, and serves no purpose but to have the potential to bias judges in favor the team that claims the smaller budget. The same holds true for socio-economic information. I would want a team to win an award because they earned it, not because they come from a neighborhood where people don't drive BMW's to the country club.

I'm going to talk with my Co-advisor as to how we want to fill this out - I want my team to be judged on their merits, not their make up. If FIRST needs to know that kind of information, they can find it through the US Census, outside of TIMS.

It's interesting. now that I am advisor of a team, I am the one going through a lot of the paperwork, and there are a few form fields here and there that give me pause. These are some of them.