Every numerical claim that appears on a SIC editorial dispatch — season counts, mentor pool sizes, rubric score distributions, Featured Cohort statistics — passes through a verification chain before publication. We document the chain here because participants and parents have asked, and because the rubric we apply to Senior Division submissions ought to apply to ourselves.
The three-source rule
Any single number cited in a Desk article must trace to at least one of three sources, in order of preference:
- Program records. Internal program desk archives going back to S1. Every season’s intake count, division split, completion rate, and Featured Cohort selection is recorded at the time. We do not back-fill.
- Mentor attestation. A number described by a SIC mentor in writing, signed and dated, with their role and tenure noted. We do not paraphrase mentor speech.
- Participant artifacts. Submitted theses, strategy reports, and Omaha Dialogue Summit transcripts. These are the corpus for any claim about rubric patterns or scoring distributions.
Numbers that cannot be traced to one of these three sources do not appear in editorial copy. If we need to reference an external number — say, a market index level — we cite the index publisher and the as-of date.
What we do not do
- We do not round to make a number look better. If 38% of S14 Senior teams cleared the Featured Cohort threshold, we publish 38%, not “roughly 40%.”
- We do not anonymize the source of a claim to make it stronger. If a number comes from a single mentor, the byline notes “as recalled by an S-series mentor” — never “industry sources.”
- We do not republish a number from a prior dispatch without re-verifying it against the source. Stale numbers are the leading cause of correction notices on any editorial product.
“The rubric we ask Senior teams to clear is the rubric we hold ourselves to. If we cannot defend a citation in front of the judging panel, we do not publish it.”
The correction policy
When a published number is found to be wrong, we do three things:
- Append a dated correction notice at the top of the original article (not at the bottom, where it is easy to miss).
- Preserve the original text struck through, so readers can see what was corrected.
- Cross-link the correction in any subsequent dispatch that referenced the wrong number.
Through S14 (fourteen seasons of dispatches) the Editorial Desk has issued seven correction notices. Six were single-digit numerical revisions caught within the same Regional Stage. One — in S9 — was a substantive misattribution of a rubric change, corrected within 48 hours of publication.
What this means for readers
Editorial dispatches on this site are written under the assumption that they will be read three years from now by someone deciding whether SIC is worth their season. We do not optimize for click-through. We optimize for the version of the reader who will check the numbers.
If you spot a number on this site that does not match your records, write to the program desk via the Contact page. We respond to all factual corrections, regardless of who is right.
— SIC Editorial Desk · Methodology note