paper: A Statistical Analysis of the Success of New England FRC Robotics Teams

[Monochron]

Originally Posted by Nathan Streeter

Just to prove a point though, look at the 'team budget' data... why do half the teams report a budget of less than 5k, when the minimum registration fee is $5k. Are these teams including only direct robot parts? Are some teams excluding registration fees? How about team apparel and team travel? What costs from team travel are included? How much of these items are self-funded my team members (and so, excluded from the budget)? I'm guessing there is an overwhelming amount of variation in these team budgets largely just from what is being included...

This caught me too. It gives the impression that the "real" budget of these teams is being hidden and, as a result, I can't really trust any of your conclusions. It would be helpful to detail your data collection methods in this regard (though I'm not sure if that was in the scope of the paper). Like, did you ask how much budget a team had to spend on their robot? Or how much money was in their account after registrations?
For instance, when my team started we had a budget of $7,500. As in, there was $7,500 in our team account. Where would we fall in your graph? Would a team that goes to two regionals 'lose' an additional $4,000 due to the way you asked for the data?