Robotics Education & Competition Foundation
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1915: Ties at the boundaries of Top 30% for Excellence


2014A
30-Jan-2024

The qualification threshold for Excellence includes, "At the conclusion of the Autonomous Coding Challenge matches, be ranked in the top 30% of teams."

Suppose an event with 20 MS teams has the following scores in Autonomous:

  • Team A: 40
  • Team B: 20
  • Team C: 20
  • Team D: 20
  • Team E: 18
  • Team F: 18
  • Team G: 18
  • Team H: 12

Top 30% means 20 * 0.3 = Top 6 teams. Teams B, C and D are tied and ranked <6 so they're clearly qualified for Autonomous. But since the cutoff is 6, that "straddles" teams E, F and G, which are tied with 18 points. Which team "wins"? Or do they all qualify equally? Or is there a tie-breaker?

I couldn't find how exactly ties are handled when it comes to ranking of Autonomous Coding Challenge, Teamwork, or Robot Skills, for purposes of Excellence Top 30%.

I'd personally be an advocate of having Teams E, F and G qualify equally for Autonomous Top 30% at the event, even though the # of teams would exceed 6 (in this case). It makes the candidate pool a bit broader and eliminates messy tiebreaking rules.

I know of the existence of rule RSC2 (https://www.vexrobotics.com/full-volume-manual#RSC2) from the manual. Are those the tiebreaker rules used for determining Top 30% for all three qualification types? If so, then to determine actual ranking for my example scores above, we'd potentially need to know the 2nd highest autonomous score for teams E, F and G (RSC2.3), and even potentially skills start/stop times? While EPs can look to the TM reports, it can be challenging (impossible?) for teams and mentors to independently confirm how tiebreaking happened, no?

Thank you!

Answered by Competition Judging Committee
31-Jan-2024

In the instance that multiple teams have achieved the same score and that score would place one of the team above the qualification cutoff, all teams with that same score would be considered qualifying; the pool of eligible teams would be expanded to include all teams with the tied score.