Judging Team Interviews

This article covers how to conduct and score a Team Interview at an event: how interviews are set up, what to listen for, and how interview findings contribute to award selection. It is written for judges and Judge Advisors.

Definitions of the terms used here are maintained in the central glossary.

For the rubric itself and how it is organized, see Team Interview Rubrics. For how interview and notebook findings come together in award selection, see Judging Deliberations.

How Interviews Work

Interviews are brief conversations between two judges and a team, held in the pit area or another public location, using the same scheduling method and roughly the same length for every team. Every team must have the opportunity to be interviewed. Teams that decline an interview are not eligible for Judged Awards, but may remain eligible for Nominated Awards.

If the team submitted a Season Summary, read it before the interview. The summary tells you what the team did; the interview is where you ask how and why. Pick a highlight and ask the team to take you underneath it. Teams that did not submit a Season Summary take part in the same interview, and are scored on the same rubric. You can open the conversation with one of the rubric's sample questions. For what teams are told about the summaries, see Season, Code, and Credit Summaries for Judging.

Conducting Interviews

The Rubric

Score every criterion (every row), and complete the rubric privately after the interview rather than across the table from the team. The rubric has six criteria across two sections, each scored on what you heard — Heard, with Specifics (2), Heard (1), or Not Yet Heard (0) — for a total of 12 points.

• Team Interview Rubric – Letter Size
• Team Interview Rubric – A4 Size 

The examples listed under each criterion are the kinds of evidence that count. You do not need to hear all of them; hearing any one of them counts. If a row has no evidence by the end of the conversation, ask one of its sample questions before marking Not Yet Heard.

What You Are Listening For

You are listening for evidence that the students did the work, learned from it, and did it together. The rubric breaks that into six criteria so scoring stays consistent between judges, but the thing you are listening for is the story of a real season, not six separate pieces.

You want students to be authentic and genuine in their conversation, rather than overly rehearsed. Real seasons are rarely completely tidy, and the interview can reflect that. Genuine can sound like teammates correcting and extending each other's answers, lingering on something that went wrong, or specifics that sharpen when you probe. Rehearsed sounds different: one voice answering everything, identical phrasing from student to student, specifics that vanish under a follow-up question. 

However, a team that sounds rehearsed has not necessarily done anything wrong — preparing is exactly what we ask teams to do. Do not score down on instinct; ask one question beneath the surface and score what you hear:

• "What did you try before that?"
• "What went wrong along the way?"
• "How did you know it worked?"
• "Can you show me that part in your notebook?"
• "If you had one more week, what would you change?"

Remember, judges are not investigators, and finding problems is not part of your job. The rubric already accounts for thin evidence: an interview without specifics, without a journey, or without student decisions will score accordingly without any special handling.

What the Scores Mean

• Heard (1) means the team did the thing. It addressed the criterion in genuine, general terms. A straight-Heard interview totals 6 of 12 — a solid conversation about a real season.
• Heard, with Specifics (2) is not simply Heard done well. It draws one specific line: the answer arrived with concrete detail — a named part, a number, a source, a moment from the season. If the details never came, Heard is the accurate score, not a penalty.
• Not Yet Heard (0) describes what was missing from the conversation, not how hard the team worked — which is why you ask one of the sample questions before marking it.

Talking with Students

Students arrive to the interview with very different levels of comfort talking to adults they have never met. Some will talk your ear off; some will study their shoes — and both kinds of teams may have had excellent seasons. Your job is to make the interview feel like a conversation rather than an evaluation, because conversation is where the evidence comes out.

• Get on their level. Sit if they sit. With younger students, crouch or pull up a chair. Standing over young students can read as a test, rather than a chat.
• Talk to the students, and show you are listening. Make eye contact with the student who is speaking — not your clipboard, not the adult behind them — and react to the story: a smile, a nod, an "oh no, what happened next?"
• Leave silence. Students need time to think. Count to five before rescuing a question, and rephrase it rather than repeating it louder.
• Open easy. "Tell me about your robot," or point at a mechanism and ask what it does. Early success settles a team down.
• Invite quiet students without cornering them. Ask the group rather than putting one student on the spot. No one on the team has to explain everything — and a quiet answer full of specifics outscores a confident answer with none.
• Take the rest in stride. An open notebook is an engineer referencing documentation. An interpreter, extra processing time, a written answer, or an accent is how that student takes part. Score the content of the answer, never the delivery.

Comfortable students give you more evidence to score. Your demeanor and approach can help build that comfort.

Adults at the Interview

Coaches and parents may be present for supervision and support, but the interview is of the team — the students themselves. If an adult answers for a student, redirect politely and keep the conversation moving: "Thanks — I'd love to hear that from the team." If it becomes a persistent problem, finish the interview and tell the Judge Advisor. Either way, score what the students said: a team should not be penalized because an adult would not stop talking.

Using Interviews for Awards

The rubric score exists to sort interviews so the deliberation conversation can start. There is no award for a great interview by itself: interview findings are part of the the evidence of judging, weighed together with notebook scores and other inputs when selecting Judged Award candidates. See Judging Deliberations for how those inputs come together, and Award Descriptions for what each award recognizes.

Take notes during or immediately after each interview. In the judging room, "they described re-testing their claw eleven times and showed us the data" carries more weight than a number.

Ownership and Honesty

Students should answer for themselves. The interview is where the Student-Centered Policy's second principle — students can explain the work — becomes something you can hear. Three situations that are legitimate and should not count against a team:

• Credited outside ideas. A team that learned a mechanism from another team, a video, or a coach — and can tell you what it changed, how it tested it, and why it works — is following the rules, not admitting a violation.
• Official VEX starting points. A team may compete with a Hero Bot as built or use a VEX code template unchanged. These are credited starting points, and building from one does not make the work less the team's own.
• Practiced answers. A team that prepared with the student-friendly rubric will sound prepared. Preparation is what we asked for; ask follow-up questions and score what you hear.

Purchased work is different: no interview answer can make bought or handed-over work the team's own. If something genuinely concerns you, including any doubt about whether the work is the team's own, tell the Judge Advisor and let them handle it. Do not express a concern as a lower score; go back to scoring what you heard.

Confidentiality

Everything you hear and record during interviews stays within the judging team. Rubric scores, notes, and completed rubrics are working documents — they are not returned to teams, shown to coaches, or shared outside the judging room, and should be destroyed at the close of an event. If a coach or team asks how their interview went, refer them to the Judge Advisor.