Official Q&A: Judging

It is my understanding that the judging criterion this year has changed to no longer include the minimum team number requirement for percentage based criterion of the excellence award

There is no minimum number of teams to be made eligible for the Excellence Award based on performance metrics.

This therefore means that all events must adhere to the top 30% of teams in the three performance categories as described in the excellence criteria:

Key criteria of the Excellence Award are:

• Be at or near the top of all Engineering Notebook Rubric rankings.
• Exhibit a high-quality team interview.
• Be ranked in the top 30% of teams at the conclusion of qualifying matches.
• Be ranked in the top 30% of teams at the conclusion of the Robot Skills Challenges
• Be ranked in the top 30% of Autonomous Coding Challenge rankings at the conclusion of the Robot Skills Challenges
• Be a candidate in consideration for other Judged Awards
• Exhibit positive team conduct, good sportsmanship, and professionalism.

In a standard event the minimum team number is 24 meaning that 8 teams would qualify under each criterion however in the event of small blended events with a minimum of 10 teams at a given age range or VEXU events with a minimum of 8 teams (from the qualifying criterion) we would see only two teams achieving each of these ranking criterion with a high likelyhood of no team meeting all criteria.

This is demonstrated even more extremely in the case of national championships in non US regions such as the VEXU national championships in Australia and New Zealand where the team numbers fall below the minimum 8 and are presented with this 30% guideline only allowing one team per criteria with 5 teams or less.

In these scenarios is it expected that the excellence award is not presented despite the circumstances of these tournaments. Specifically in VEXU frequent non-awarding of the excellence award would have major repercussions on the eligibility for the excellence award at the world championships?