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XXGeneration wrote:I can only pray it's something more difficult than electrochem.. perhaps like equilibrium.

The tentative plan is indeed equilibrium.

I think you just made my day!

Is periodicity still going to be there, or will that rotate to something harder too?

XXGeneration wrote: I think you just made my day!

Is periodicity still going to be there, or will that rotate to something harder too?

After hearing about the lab portion at NY states this year, I hope that either periodicity rotates out, supervisors think of less bizarre periodicity labs, or they just stop trying to make the lab focus on that section of the event.

What was the lab for NY?

XXGeneration wrote:What was the lab for NY?

Teams were given a bunch of stickers with names of colleges on them, and a sort of periodic table-shaped grid. Based on various information they were given about the colleges (size, location, degrees offered, etc), they were supposed to arrange the stickers into a "periodic table" of colleges.

The worst part was the way it was scored: you got one point for each sticker placed correctly – so even if you got the correct trends, if you shifted them one over somehow, you got no points. The top teams all did very poorly on this event.

Can't wait to get rid of electrochem...and hopefully periodicity. I hope they put kinetics in as well, it goes well with equilibrium and you can have a lot more connections.

Phenylethylamine wrote:

XXGeneration wrote:What was the lab for NY?

Teams were given a bunch of stickers with names of colleges on them, and a sort of periodic table-shaped grid. Based on various information they were given about the colleges (size, location, degrees offered, etc), they were supposed to arrange the stickers into a "periodic table" of colleges.

The worst part was the way it was scored: you got one point for each sticker placed correctly – so even if you got the correct trends, if you shifted them one over somehow, you got no points. The top teams all did very poorly on this event.

Not exactly - 6th place Brighton got 1st, 4th place Columbia got 4th and 3rd place Syosset got 6th. And over the past few years, Chem Lab seems to be one of the events least likely to be medaled in if the team places in the top tier. So really, the fact that a few medals ranked in the top 6 is more remarkable than last year, where only Half Hollow Hills got a medal in the top 10.
But yes, I will concur, the lab was ludicrous.

quizbowl wrote:

Phenylethylamine wrote:

XXGeneration wrote:What was the lab for NY?

Teams were given a bunch of stickers with names of colleges on them, and a sort of periodic table-shaped grid. Based on various information they were given about the colleges (size, location, degrees offered, etc), they were supposed to arrange the stickers into a "periodic table" of colleges.

The worst part was the way it was scored: you got one point for each sticker placed correctly – so even if you got the correct trends, if you shifted them one over somehow, you got no points. The top teams all did very poorly on this event.

Not exactly - 6th place Brighton got 1st, 4th place Columbia got 4th and 3rd place Syosset got 6th. And over the past few years, Chem Lab seems to be one of the events least likely to be medaled in if the team places in the top tier. So really, the fact that a few medals ranked in the top 6 is more remarkable than last year, where only Half Hollow Hills got a medal in the top 10.
But yes, I will concur, the lab was ludicrous.

I suppose I was exaggerating based on the fact that FM and Ward Melville both tanked spectacularly, despite both schools having very good people on the event (no, I was not one of them). Chem Lab really shouldn't be a particularly high-variance event, but it seems to be.

I did Chem Lab at States last year, though; that was a hard event, with significant time pressure (and we got very little glassware and a broken pipette bulb, but oh well). I'd say the time and the restricted materials were probably the biggest factors in shaking up the scores so much.

quizbowl wrote:

Phenylethylamine wrote:

XXGeneration wrote:What was the lab for NY?

Teams were given a bunch of stickers with names of colleges on them, and a sort of periodic table-shaped grid. Based on various information they were given about the colleges (size, location, degrees offered, etc), they were supposed to arrange the stickers into a "periodic table" of colleges.

The worst part was the way it was scored: you got one point for each sticker placed correctly – so even if you got the correct trends, if you shifted them one over somehow, you got no points. The top teams all did very poorly on this event.

Not exactly - 6th place Brighton got 1st, 4th place Columbia got 4th and 3rd place Syosset got 6th. And over the past few years, Chem Lab seems to be one of the events least likely to be medaled in if the team places in the top tier. So really, the fact that a few medals ranked in the top 6 is more remarkable than last year, where only Half Hollow Hills got a medal in the top 10.
But yes, I will concur, the lab was ludicrous.

Actually, Stuyvesant (10th overall) got 4th that year as well. Also, there were only two top ten teams that did not score in the top 20 in this event, as compared to 4 this year. Still, you have a valid point - the results were not quite as unusual as the performance of WM and FM suggest. As you say, though, the lab was ludicrous.

So how do people feel about the new topic being equilibrium and periodicity?

I think that equilibrium is a good idea, but there's too many types of equilibrium. So many things, like acid-base, solubility, hetero/homogeneous equilibrium, can be counted as equilibrium. I do like that equilibrium can have much harder questions than some other topics, and that it can have some good labs.