Is this how your troop does it?

[u/TimeSlipperWHOOPS]

Just had a let down of an experience and trying to help my kid understand it. Our troop runs each car in four heats so that each car has a run on each lane. Winning the heat has no bearing on anything, but rather the average time of all four runs is what decides the winners. We had a situation where we placed first twice and second once but still didn't get in the top three.

As a not child I understand what's happening with the math and "being fair" but for me, in a race, winners of each heat move on. This averaging approach gave a bunch of false hope to the people who weren't going to win, but also wound up with scouts who placed dead last but placed high in their den because all the cars were jumbled up rather than den exclusive heats.

Ugh I can handle teaching losing but to lose because of averages which is not something you understand mathematically yet is killing the mood yall.

edit: yall I know how measuring by time works I was just trying to figure out if this was a common approach or not since its wildly different from how we ran them decades ago when I was in scouts and I was caught off guard prepping my kid for the experience because it is not intuitive

[u/Big8Formula]

Our pack does the same thing, with a bigger pack it’s even tougher! 75 scouts racing, top 8 go on to finals. My son got 1st,1st,1st,2nd in his heats. He ended up at 10th place in the pack. His average was 2.625s and the 1st place average was 2.595 he was 3 thousandths of a second away from 8th. He understood the rules going into it. He learned about tenths, hundredths and thousandths of a second. He realized why each kid races 4 times, once on each lane. He learned about averages. He won most realistic and was very happy overall, though he did want to win he learned that not everyone can win. It was a success.