Many new VEX families assume the team with the best robot wins everything, but VEX awards judging rewards far more than match scores.
VEX Robotics, organized by the REC Foundation, runs several program levels: the VEX IQ Robotics Competition (VIQRC) for elementary students, the VEX V5 Robotics Competition (V5RC) for middle and high schoolers, and VEX U (VURC) plus VEX AI for college-level teams. Across all of them, awards fall into two distinct buckets. Understanding how those buckets work helps students invest their effort where it actually counts, and helps parents cheer for the right things.
Performance Awards vs. Judged Awards
Performance awards are earned purely on the field. The Tournament Champion award goes to the alliance that wins the elimination bracket, and the Robot Skills Champion goes to the team with the highest combined driver and autonomous coding skills scores. These are objective: the scoreboard decides.
Judged awards are different. A panel of volunteer judges evaluates how a team thinks, designs, documents, and conducts itself. Two teams with identical match records can earn very different judged awards based on their engineering process and how well they explain it. This is the part of VEX competition that surprises families most, and it is where preparation outside of building pays off.
The judged awards you'll hear about
- Excellence Award — the highest honor at an event, recognizing a team that is strong in both judged and performance categories.
- Design Award — for a team with an outstanding engineering notebook and interview that demonstrate a clear design process.
- Innovate Award — for a well-documented, novel approach to a robot or strategy problem.
- Judges Award — discretionary recognition for a team the judges feel deserves special acknowledgment.
Depending on the program and event size, you may also see awards such as Think, Amaze, Build, Create, Inspire, and Sportsmanship. Award lists and exact criteria change over time, so always confirm the current slate in the official Game Manual and judging guide before an event.
How the Excellence Award Works
The Excellence Award is the one most ambitious teams chase, because it typically signals all-around excellence and often advances the winner to the next level of competition. It bundles the Design Award criteria together with on-field results. While exact thresholds are published each season and should be verified officially, the qualitative picture is consistent:
To be in contention, a team generally needs strong rankings across qualification matches and both skills challenges, a near-top engineering notebook, a high-quality interview, and candidacy for other judged awards — with conduct and sportsmanship factored in.
In other words, the Excellence Award rewards the team that is genuinely good at everything, not just the team that scored the most points. That balance is intentional: VEX is built around the full engineering design process, the same problem-solving discipline students use in research and innovation projects.
What Judges Actually Look At
Judges usually work in small groups of two or three. They review each team's engineering notebook, conduct a short interview in the team's pit, and observe behavior throughout the day before deliberating ahead of the elimination rounds. Three inputs drive their decisions:
- The engineering notebook. This documents the team's design process — ideas, prototypes, tests, failures, and iterations. A clear, dated, student-authored notebook tells the story of how the robot came to be.
- The team interview. Typically a brief conversation, it asks students to explain their design choices, strategy, and teamwork. Judges want to hear authentic, student-led answers — VEX is intentionally student-centered, so adults should stay out of the pit.
- Conduct and professionalism. Gracious behavior toward opponents, volunteers, and teammates is weighed throughout the event.
Preparing for judged success
The students who do well in VEX awards judging treat documentation and communication as core engineering skills, not afterthoughts. They rehearse explaining trade-offs, can point to specific notebook entries, and let every team member speak. Those habits — clear reasoning, evidence, and teamwork — transfer directly to other arenas like academic competitions and college applications.
At BIAA, our coaches help students build competition-ready robots and the notebook-and-interview discipline that earns judged awards. Explore our robotics program to start preparing your team for the field and the judges alike.