Four platforms, at a glance
VEX V5 Robotics Competition
VEX U Robotics Competition
VEX AI Robotics Competition
VEX IQ Robotics Competition
Scoring breakdown
The cards above show how each platform is built. This is how VEX turns a day of matches into the numbers that actually decide rankings. Every platform funnels down to the same handful of results, and those results are the raw material the RFORCE Index reads from.
The head-to-head model
These three platforms rank teams from their qualification matches using the same three-tier system, applied strictly in order:
Win Points (WP), the primary factor. A team earns 2 WP for a match win and 1 for a tie. It can also earn 1 extra WP, the Autonomous Win Point (AWP), by completing a defined set of tasks during the 15-second autonomous period, awarded whether or not its alliance wins the match. That caps a qualification match at 3 WP.
Autonomous Points (AP), the first tiebreaker. The alliance that outscores the other during the autonomous period wins the Autonomous Bonus and banks AP, split evenly on a tie. The exact AP value changes from game to game, which is one reason a raw AP number is hard to compare across seasons.
Strength of Schedule Points (SP), the second tiebreaker. A team's SP equals the losing alliance's score in each of its matches, so a high SP means a team kept landing in close, high-scoring matches against strong opponents.
Because teams do not always play the same number of matches, these are compared on a per-match average rather than a raw total.
The cooperative model
VEX IQ has no opponent to beat, so none of the WP / AP / SP machinery applies. Instead:
Both teams in an alliance share one combined score for the match.
A team's rank is the average of its qualification scores, not a win total.
To reward consistency over a single lucky match, each team's lowest scores are dropped: one dropped for every four matches played, so 8 matches means the two worst are thrown out.
In finals, teams are paired strictly by rank (1st with 2nd, 3rd with 4th, and so on). Each alliance plays one finals match, and the highest finals score takes the Teamwork Champion title.
Skills and awards
Two more result types show up at nearly every event, regardless of platform:
- Robot Skills is a solo challenge. A team's Skills score for an event is its highest Driving Skills run plus its highest Autonomous Coding run, with up to three attempts at each. VAIRC is the exception: it runs a single autonomous run and counts it twice, since there is no human driving portion.
- Awards are a mix of performance awards (like Tournament Champion) and judged awards (like Excellence, based on the engineering notebook and team interview). One limitation matters for later: the public data shows only whether a team won a given award, never the underlying judged score.
Where the RFORCE Index takes over
Here is the key point. The internal scoring above differs by platform and changes every season, so a raw WP total or an AP value means little next to another platform's number, or even the same platform a year later. But no matter the platform or the game, every standalone event resolves to the same standardized outputs:
- Qualification Ranking
- Finals (or Teamwork) Ranking
- Robot Skills Ranking
- Award Winners
Multi-division events like the VEX Robotics World Championship add a Grand Finals Ranking on top.
The RFORCE Index reads those standardized rankings, not the raw internal scoring. That is the whole trick: by starting from where every platform already agrees, the Index turns four very different scoring systems into one number that stays comparable across platforms and across seasons.