In college I liked to run job interview prep events using the most difficult questions I could find and walk through how to answer them well. I’d pull from both online articles/lists and ask for attendees to submit their own. I figured something similar might help nervous students prep for talking to judges.
There’s a couple lists of Impact/Chairman’s Award questions running around, but I didn’t see much for pit judging. Obviously there are recommended questions for judges to follow, but has anybody gotten any questions out of left field? Even if they were very specific to your team or robot.
As mentor I specifically walk away from the pits when judges come by, so they can only talk to the students and not me.
But this year at OCR the students ran over and brought me back, because the judges actually wanted to ask me a question.
They asked where I came from and why I mentor this particular team. Of course I gave the background they asked for but thought the question was unusual.
This isn’t meant to trigger anyone by any means or draw attention to ourselves.
But this was asked at the Ventura regional back in 2022.
“Are any of your team members gay?”
This offended the student on our team that was asked that. We found out who it was and the team that this person was associated with. We will leave it at that.
Sadly this is a completely normalized question in the HR corner of many industries, as they try to collect data and disprove allegations of a lack of diverse hiring. Probably not where they’re coming from, but I get forms of this question pretty bluntly whenever I’m looking for a job.
The questions you get from judges are often reflective of their particular industry/expertise - I can immediately differentiate the ones who have done FRC vs being a JPL employee. In turn, you want to condition your answers to reflect their experience. I tell the FRC alum that the robot is using a NavX for positioning, and the JPL employee hears that it’s a simple IMU.
I don’t recall any questions being particularly odd, but we tried to be prepared for anything. If a question seems strange, just ask for more context about what they’re trying to learn about your team or robot - more often than not, there is an understanding gap regarding how FRC is structured and you’ll need to give more context.
Had a judge at our comp last weekend ask me how robotics and frc has changed or impacted my life. Seems like a simple enough question, but it was very difficult to fully answer when I though about it. Still not quite sure how to fully answer that question to be honest
Yeah, this sucks. : ( I was afraid there might be a response like that, definitely not the kind of question you want to have to prep students to answer…
On a much more positive note, I’ve heard a couple judges say they really like to ask “what’s the funniest thing that has happened this season?” Glad I never got asked that as a student, because most of my answers would have been narrowly avoided injuries…
I’m not a huge fan of the question “How is your team sustainable?” because it’s always a coin flip whether they want to hear about recycling or recruitment.
There really is no standard set of questions though. I’ve been at events where sustainability only meant team/robot and others where it meant only environmentally. I personally wish there was more clarity around this.
As for crazy questions…what’s the biggest animal you think you personally could fight and win in hand to hand combat? It was meant to be a fun question to get the kids to laugh and feel more at ease and it 100% worked.
Last year we had a judge who asked when the team started to think and work on the robot. The students were a bit confused and replied since kickoff day, and then the judge asked when was that…
At the end of the interview the students were explaining the judge that year’s game.
I was a first time judge this past weekend. Some of the stranger questions mentioned above come from the newer Team Sustainability Award. Here is the description and guidelines for the award.
Team Sustainability Award
Description: Celebrates and recognizes a team which has developed sustainable practices to have a positive environmental impact and achieve long-term continuity.
Guidelines:
The team has a clear concept or approach to building their team and operates as a cohesive unit.
The team proactively identified and managed risks, acquiring the assets to effectively deal with adversity as well as unexpected events.
The team understands that operating in harmony with the environment is important for long-term team viability.
The team is taking steps to reduce their environmental impact and building environmental sustainability into team activities.
The team understood the goals of the competition and the mission of FIRST.
The team must be able to explain:
What team sustainability practices are in place such as recruiting and training future team members.
How the team keeps students, mentors, and sponsors actively engaged by making decisions and dividing their workload
How the team celebrate success and document lessons learned to prevent repeating mistakes
How the team assesses its environmental impact and what the team does to mitigate or reduce it.
How the team’s environmental sustainability strategy impacts their team longevity.
How the team is funded and how the team budgets, including potential revenue from sustainability practices like metal recycling
As you can see, evaluating which teams most deserve this award in a pit interview is exceedingly difficult, as the criteria are broad. If you compare the information the judges were trying to gather to the strange questions mentioned above, you can probably see why they were asked.
Note that the description and guidelines are published for every judged award. That information is exactly what is provided to the judges by FIRST to evaluate the teams. So, if your team is serious about going for any specific award, guide the conversation with the judges to be outstanding for the set of guidelines for the award you’re targeting. The perfect place for this is at the end of the interview when the judges ask, " Is there anything else you’d like to tell us about your robot?" (technical judges) or “about your team?” (team attribute judges).
Not during pit judging, but last year during impact presentation we got asked what Chief Delphi was after we said we were an OA team with a thread on Chief Delphi.
