Posted by Joe P in Academy Ship Experience

Posted by Adam W. in Academy Ship Experience

Posted by Sarah M in Academy Ship Experience
The Challenger recently lost its counselor for the second time in a few months and this led to a brief discussion with the current club and Academy leadership about CADET and the guidelines surrounding the Academy ship experience. I personally find it very difficult to follow the way bills are structured without the full updated text, so I have included the relevant portions of CADET as currently enacted at the end of this post for reference’s sake.

(snip)

I don’t personally like trying to limit cadets to one thread. I have trouble imagining value being gained from it. And I think the downside could be pretty high as new players tend to be impatient, wanting to post more frequently than the veteran players that are their initial writing partners. If cadets have offered positive or negative feedback on this approach it would be interesting to hear about their opinion of it.

First, I would like to highlight that this is an unofficial policy and that there is nothing actually preventing cadets from posting in as many threads as they would like as quickly as they would like. Second, this isn’t something that we arbitrarily decided to implement because it sounded cool to wrap red tape around new members’ experience in the club.

I already highlighted one piece of value gained in my initial post, which is that it allows new members who are struggling to adapt to the posting style in STF to be interacting with and receiving feedback from only one point person (their department head). We received feedback from several new members that a swarm of people “helping” them with STF was very overwhelming and, inadvertently, the advice can be contradictory. It also allows these people to focus on figuring out the basic mechanics of posting first before delving deeper into topics like character development and multiple timeline management. It can be figured out within a post or two whether the new member could benefit from more one-on-one attention, so it typically does not hold back an excited new member who does not need that and who is ready to jump into multiple timelines with both feet. I have not received any negative feedback from cadets about this; it usually appears pretty seamless to them since the DH points them toward the next threads they could start with an OOC message and/or works them into the main sim.

I agree on the Lieutenant Junior Grade suggestion. I had progressed beyond that rank by the time I had realized my Academy rank didn’t actually affect my member rank. If nothing else it would be more intuitive for the graduate.

Adam W.

Re, this one bit:

It also means that the player has to go from one thread with their DH to two threads (med eval / psych eval) to four concurrent threads (med eval / psych eval / main sim / side sim) in order to fulfill the requirements on the Academy graduation evaluation.

The requirement is that they know how to manage multiple threads. It is not that they master more than three threads at a single time. As a matter of fact, the reason why we added the menu item on the form to allow evaluators to select the option “More than three threads at a time” is that we thought this was actually extremely unlikely, and we wanted to evaluate whether or not the Academy staff were just blindly filling out the form. We don’t expect anyone to handle more than three (e.g. DH, med, and psych, or a main and two sides) at any one time.

The perfect score on the form is impossible by design, it is not a goal anyone is expected to achieve. If I see someone with a perfect score on the evaluations it’s one of several signs that the evaluators aren’t really doing their job right.

Joe

This is not a reference toward that particular criteria, but rather the requirements as a whole. In order to graduate someone to main fleet, they must average a score of a three across the seven categories; in order to retain someone as a DH, they must average a score of four across the seven categories (granted, there is freedom to explain why someone should graduate/be retained when they don’t meet that). To achieve a four across several of the requirements, new members must have a character with more than average depth, initiate positive crew interaction, and actively participate in the main sim (or in side sims to keep busy). We also want to make sure that new members have every opportunity to score fives across the board if we can, so trying to get them involved in various timelines to showcase the requirements is part of that.

• Sarah, CO, USS Challenger