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2409: Blended Event with no ES Design Candidate


8056A
22-Dec-2024

At a Blended (ES+MS) event, if the list of Design Award candidates ends up being only MS teams, does this mean no ES Excellence award should be given?

In "Step 4 - Final Ranking of Award Winners" the Guide says, "In the case of the Excellence Award, the winner should come from the list of Design Award finalists that meet the criteria for Performance Awards and other Judged Awards." But no consideration is made to distinguish between ES and MS Design candidates.

Judges are not asked to maintain two lists (one ES, one MS), and generally make nominations for Design without considering whether a team is MS or ES.

For blended events it's quite likely that MS team notebooks and interviews are stronger than most ES teams. Thus it's likely that no ES team ends up on the short list for Design (3rd-5th grade vs. 6th-8th in interviewing and notebook skills).

Many Regions, including ours, consist of almost exclusively Blended Qualification events.

Answered by Competition Judging Committee
6-Jan-2025

In the Guide to Judging, under the first Note for the Excellence Award description, there exists the following verbiage that we think answers your question:

Under certain conditions, at “blended” events which combine both grade levels (middle school and high school for V5RC, elementary school and middle school for VIQRC, and high school and university for VAIRC), one Excellence Award per grade level may be awarded. This is determined by the Qualifying Criteria. In the instance of two grade level specific Excellence Awards being given out at an event, teams are only compared to teams of the same grade level. This includes quantitative event data, such as rankings. When only one Excellence Award is given out for an event with multiple grade levels, all teams are considered together without regard for their grade level.

For example, in a 24-team blended event with a single Excellence Award, 40% of 24 teams would be 9.6, which rounds up to 10 teams. To be eligible for Excellence, a team would need to be ranked in the top 10 in the event for the above performance metrics to be eligible for the Excellence Award. If the event had 12 teams of each grade level, thus meeting the requirements for two grade level specific Excellence Awards, then 40% of 12 teams comes out to 4.8, which rounds up to 5. In this instance, teams would need to be ranked 5th place or higher within their grade level in the above performance metrics to be eligible for the grade level specific Excellence Award.

In the circumstance that an event has two Excellence Awards to determine, judges should separately rank notebooks for each grade level.