We went through our driver selection testing announced this years driver. One day later the students that did the math for the selection process noticed that they did not normalize one segment of the testing which resulted in that phase being weighted 3 times more than it should have been. After normalizing that data and redoing the math the student that had originally been in second place was now in first place by 1 percentage point.
The students were told about it and were given a chance to work it out. Possible outcomes could have been
A: leaving the original announcement stand
B: giving the driver position to the student that actually won the competition
C: sharing the drive time(one student for one regional and the other for the other regional(but then what to do if we go to worlds?)
No agreement has happened yet.
My inclination is as follows, no matter how close the real result is, had the math been done correctly in the first place the winner would have been announced and there would have been no discussion about who gets to drive no matter how close the end result. I believe this is the way things would work in the real world and we are trying to prepare students for the real world.
Horse race is won by a nose, winner still wins.
Nascar race is won by a bumper, winner still wins.
Foot race is won by .001 seconds, winner still wins.
Steve Harvey announces the wrong Miss USA winner, correction is made and the rightful girl becomes Miss USA.
So, I am asking the community to speak your thoughts about how to handle this.
Has the first driver had practice time? How big was the difference (2/3 arbitrary points or was the other person remarkably better)? Is one a Grade 9 and another a Grade 12? I need a bit of context to judge on your situation.
Ultimately I think it’s unfortunate that the process wasn’t the most fair, c’est la vie.
In my team, there were two people who never got the opportunity to try out, and because we had only like 3 days to select a full 9-person drive team (backups too), there were some shortcuts I had too take.
I think that if you give the second place person the position of “operator” or have him/her as a backup it would be beneficial. I don’t recommend the split driving - we tried that last year and it didn’t work very well.
If your selection criteria is objective like that, and was agreed upon by all parties before participating, it is only fair to give the position to the correct first place candidate. The only exception I would make for this is if the current driver already has vastly more experience practicing with this robot, and thus too much work has been invested in the current driver to justify the switch. If they are both equally(ish) experienced, then switching makes sense.
That said, if you were to start from scratch, I would not pick drivers in this way.
From what I can see, it seems your team has laid out a process for choosing a driver, and you should stick with it. It really really sucks to be the student pushed out after thinking they had received the spot, but it sucks even more to be a student to know that you should have been the one selected, but because the team didn’t want to make a change you aren’t.
It’s not a personal decision that way, and you follow the set-out plan that was in place when you started. Make sure that your kids know that it’s a hard choice to make, and let people who may disagree speak their mind (if they haven’t already). That’s the worst to have a team that isn’t willing to talk about what is on their mind and frustrating them. Emphasise that both students are great drivers, and from whatever mathematical method you were using, it was a super close race and could have easily gone either way, but ultimately I think you need to follow your procedure that you lined up originally to maintain integrity over the decision. It’s hard to argue about a method that presumably everyone agreed with prior to testing.
Echoing Chris’s sentiments with the agreement that this may not be the best method of driver selection.
Like 6070s drive coach already stated, it’s important to know how old each of the participants are. If they are both the same age, it becomes a little more complicated. However, if one of them is a senior that has been waiting for his or her opportunity to drive, I’d give it to them because 1% is a splitting hairs difference. Some may not like rewarding seniority if they aren’t the “best”, but I personally think it’s the right thing to do.
Another solution is practice day. Nothing is quite like driving on the actual field, so you could alternate between them on that day and let them decide who’s more comfortable driving. It can be very unnerving being the driver and it’s something you can never really prepare for.
I am the drive coach and strategy captain for team 2537.
We have a more subjective driver selection process, where we weight many other factors than raw skill when deciding who is on the drive team. If the two drivers are that close in raw skill as to almost score the same, I would generally recommend selecting the driver who is the most mature, and the one you most want representing your team.
Because you announced the process already however, I do agree to some extent that the highest objective score, regardless of errors, should get the job.
I would recommend putting both of them on the drive team. Really either should be still happy to be the manipulator or human player as well, so offer the student who isn’t the driver another position if you trust them to perform it.
I generally would recommend not switching drivers between competitions, as you loose the experience gained at the first one.
But ultimately, I am not remotely an expert. No one on chief is an expert on your team. The best advice I would have is to do what you think is best for your team, and achieving your team’s goals.
On Wave the criteria for selecting the drive team is all on the mentors, and how we select the drive team is not shared with the students. We do this because picking a drive team is SOOO subjective, that a purely statistical selection through a rules test and driver test doesn’t always spit out the best possible people for the job. We still do the rules test and typically have a robot skills test as well, but the “best” scores in them rarely get to be the driver.
That said you’ve announced who the drive team is and I would stick with it.
The first and second places after the math was corrected were 1 percent apart from each other.
The real winner is a senior that designed 80 percent of the bot and is always counted on to get anything done. The second place person is a junior that is always around but spends most of his time socializing and at times distracting others and has had little input on design.
Agreed. It’s technically more “fair”, but you should carry over the experience from the first regional over to the second, and onward to the Championship.
For us is was a three part test.
Part one was a written rules test.
Part two was a gear cycle and hang test(4 iterations averaged)
Part 3 was a fuel pickup test. we put a set number of fuel on the floor in a set pattern and timed each driver(we had 4) to see how many fuel they could pick up in a set time.
Like I said in my post, there is a subjective portion to the driver selection on Wave. Your part 4 needs to be the subjective part, where you weigh what the student does on the team, what type of mentality do they have, do they take direction well, do they perform under pressure, etc. Stuff like that needs to be apart of your driver selection. The kid who scores the best on your 3 part test doesn’t always equate to the person you should have controlling the sticks.
Echoing the statements of many others, I think we both know what your answer is.
It may be disappointing for the second place student, but I would rather risk disappointing him than taking away the position from the senior who has worked hard.
I’m the drive coach for 5484 and the most important criteria for choosing drivers for me is that the chosen drive team must be hardworkers.
My drivers are the hardest workers on the team, hands down. Those positions belong to the students who deserve them.
I would rather have my driver be a deserving student and mediocre driver than a fantastic driver and mediocre student.
The drivers of any team should be the ones you want people to associate with their team.
I know what my heart is telling me. I just want to know if the community feels the same way.
I also know that the second place driver(the junior) and his parents are going to make an issue out of it. I am afraid that if I give the job to him it will be at least in part because of a fear of having to deal with that.
I’ve dealt with upset parents yelling at me that they are “ruining their childs life”. My big suggestion is to get others on board, lead mentors, lead students (student captain), the rest of the drive team ect. Get support, you are not going into this alone.