Chairman's Award Concerns

[dtengineering]

Originally Posted by Dale

I think what's really needed for the Chairman's Award is some form of peer review. The judges aren't in a position to determine the amount of creative embellishment in those essays and presentations nor do they have time to do so. As a previous poster mentioned, can they can't always figure out the timeline of things a team does.

While I cannot, of course, speak for every regional I can say that my experience as a judge for the past two years in Seattle has confirmed every hope and expectation that I had when I coached/mentored a team. The judges are just as critical, dedicated and determined as you would expect.

Specifically, I have had the honour of being on the RCA judging panel the past two years and am pleased to assure everyone that we are well aware of the significance of the RCA.

Teams that have won have tended to do a very good job of documenting their accomplishments with thank you letters, event invitations, photographs, media clippings... in fact, I would tend to say that for true RCA contending teams the issue is not one of "how do we embellish our accomplishments", but rather one of "which ones do we leave out" due to space and time limitations. We have never been in need of "fact checking" due to the documentaiton provided by teams, but do go through the top few applications with a fine-toothed comb. I can't speak for my colleages on the panel, but if a team were found to be playing fast-and-loose with the truth it would be a quick and easy way to eliminate them from contention.

I appreciate the concern being expressed in this thread... and would not oppose seeing winning RCA submissions published in an open forum. I question the need to do this formally, as I doubt there is an RCA winning team that would hesitate to share their documentation at the end of the season if asked politely. (We never won RCA, but we often published our submission on our website anyway...)

However I do wish to reassure people that the judges did not just fall off the back of a turnip truck...

Jason