Design Judging Experiences

[Go Hawks]

Hey everyone,

My first design judging event was this past weekend at West and to say the least, it was not what I expected. As the chassis lead, the only question I got was if our car met rules or not. Our aero lead had a similar experience, only being asked if our wings were stiff enough.

Has anyone had a similar experience and what did you do to counteract what seemed like disinterest towards what we had done. My strategy was to ask any judges that weren't talking to another team member if they had any questions. Any thoughts on whether or not I should have been more forceful and just told them about the chassis instead?

[Go Hawks]

Hey everyone,

My first design judging event was this past weekend at West and to say the least, it was not what I expected. As the chassis lead, the only question I got was if our car met rules or not. Our aero lead had a similar experience, only being asked if our wings were stiff enough.

Has anyone had a similar experience and what did you do to counteract what seemed like disinterest towards what we had done. My strategy was to ask any judges that weren't talking to another team member if they had any questions. Any thoughts on whether or not I should have been more forceful and just told them about the chassis instead?

[PatClarke]

GH,
That really is disappointing, although not having been there to see what happened, it is hard to comment more.

As the number of FSAE type events proliferates, it becomes very difficult to get good Design Judges to every event, and it is fair to say there is a degree of acrimony between the motorsport Design Judges and the SAE which has seen several experienced judges stand down in recent years. This is one of several issues the SAE and some other organisers have to address.

At FSG in Germany we realise that good Design Judges are very hard to find and very hard to retain so we have instituted a Design Judge Training program where we invite recent alumnis to join the Judging team (without voting rights) to learn the ropes. This scheme is working very well and will permit old fogies like me to retire sometime =]

If you care to email me your Design Review and Spec Sheet, I will give you an appraisal of your design from a distance, however, this doesn't tell me 'why' you did certain things rather than 'what' you did. This is the real skill in Design Judging...having the team defend their design decisions.

Regards
Pat Clarke

jpatc (AT) bigpond (DOT) com

[Rachel]

You should have definitely had a presentation prepared on the chassis to show the judges. The best teams in design talk the whole time (relevant talk though, not just BS!) and the judges have to interrupt them to get some important questions in.

Judges really want to hear the team leader give a 2-3 minute overview of the car stating the goals for the entire team. Then when it is broken down to specific areas, the judges want to hear:
1) Goals for the chassis (weight, torsional rigidity, ease of manufacturing, ease of serviceability, minimize time it takes to remove engine, yadda yadda) The goals themselves are specific to each team and the judges realize this, as long as the goals are reasonable. However, every team should have a torsional rigidity goal for the chassis.

2) How you chose those goals. Example: "We chose this torsional rigidity because it's greater than last year's car" is not a sufficient answer.

3) How you accomplished your goals (or why you didn't) through analysis and testing.

The judges should not have to work to learn about your car. Their questions should be to pry into you further to see if you really know what you're talking about, or to challenge something you said in your presentation.

Rachel
2008 West, Junior Frame Judge

[Rachel]

Also, I believe your school had a carbon tub?

I'm sorry that it seems you had a judge that was not very familiar with carbon tubs. Hopefully you got some good feedback from the judge you were speaking with during the feedback session.

[Go Hawks]

Thanks Rachel for the feedback. We'll work a lot on getting our design goals and decisions out there.
Ya, we had a carbon tub and we got a lot of good feedback from Neil Rodgers (spelling?) as far as chassis and aero went.

[Charlie]

Sorry your design event was not what you expected.

I agree with Rachel that it's good for teams to be prepared to talk about their area on their own. Some judges are more inclined to take a 'listening' approach, some judges are more inlcined to take control of the conversation. Teams should really try to be prepared for either.

That means, be ready to talk about your car mostly on your own, but also prepare for the possibility that a judge is going to interrupt your well prepared speech and start firing off questions!

I did not get a chance to talk to you guys in the design review, but hopefully a lot of your design event questions were answered.

[Wesley]

Design went rather well I thought, and I learned quite a bit. Semis was a nice experience for us as a new team.

Charlie, I enjoyed talking to you during prelims and design review, it's always nice to get an outsiders view on a design to see if everything in my head makes sense.

[Drew Price]

For anyone who may not have spotted this over on the official site, a very informative, though situational and qualitative take, on the design judging process from everyone's buddy, Mr. Smith.

Everything You Wanted To Know About Design Judging (http://www.sae.org/students/fsae-judge.doc)

Helped me get in the right mindset when I was studying up for design at MIS, helped my team-mates out too.

Best,
Drew

[Ben C-M]

We had a similar experience at FSAE-East two years ago. We didn't have a single judge interested in suspension design, and while the judges were all engaged with other team members, our suspension team was basically sitting idle, or answer one off questions. When the suspension leader tried to explain the design, judges would simply say that they weren't interested and go off to talk to someone else.

After the judging, we had several other judges review our vehicle for feedback, and after speaking to Claude Rouelle for about 10 minutes, he asked us how we didn't make it into the semis...

[murpia]

Just a final word before FSUK design judging kicks off tomorrow:

Design Judges are tasked with evaluating WHY a team made the choices they did, more so than WHAT they did.

Avoid answering questions with phrases like 'we felt', 'we thought', 'we wanted to' etc.

Better to answer 'we calculated', 'we analysed', 'we benchmarked', 'we measured', 'we tested' etc. And show some data to back it up.

Good luck,
Ian