Highest Scores this Year

patil215
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Re: Highest Scores this Year

Post by patil215 »

chalker wrote: 3. The arbitration committee believes strongly in the idea that as long as it's within the spirit of the event and not explicitly forbidden, it's allowed. Over the years I've seen NUMEROUS event supervisors get upset at them for not ruling based upon their 'intention of the rules' versus what is actually written in the rules.
Seems as though this was directly violated by the arbitration committee then. We did not directly interpret the rules to gain an unfair advantage. We could have easily modified our device to be legal within an hour had we known, and the device would not have scored any less. Instead, we lost points and our appeal failed because we failed to interpret the "intent" of the rules clarification which is literally impossible for a competitor to predict.

I still have no idea what to do differently in the future. It's impossible for me to know what the intent of a rule is and there's no way of knowing what is legal in this event, as the exact same proctor rules one thing legal in one tournament and the opposite in another without any informing of the competitor.

Frankly, I'm extremely disappointed in the way this event was handled over this year. I've now had somewhat of a loss of faith in Science Olympiad as I have seen that hard work and the spririt of the competition are not always rewarded.
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SWAnG
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Re: Highest Scores this Year

Post by SWAnG »

Strange, since my team appealed, Troy's team appealed, and the team just mentioned above me seemed to have as well. Isn't that already 3 rejected?

Also, the arbitration committee "solicited input" only from the event supervisor, and I was never allowed to say a single word to them. In addition, the appeals form has the appealing team first state the problem, then the event supervisor is allowed to have a rebuttal statement. I was never allowed to put in my word after the event supervisor was able to read and construct an argument from mine.

I'm glad that the arbitration committee is separate but it kinda defeats the purpose if they still get a one-sided opinion.

Evidently my interpretation was within the spirit of the event, and followed the guidelines. It's been allowed at every tournament I've been to, and I was able to support it with documents and FAQ inquiries. I wasn't trying to cheat, why would I spent so many hours on something that would just get ruled out?

Regardless, what are the chances that 3/8 appeals came from one table? Statistically it does not make sense.

I'm sorry if I come across dissapointed or argumentative. It wasn't the most pleasant way to end my 4 years of Science Olympiad, and hours of work on mission. Especially when there was little I could have done more to discover that it would not have been allowed. I'm a grad of scioly, and I love it so much. I simply hope to prevent this chaos and frustration for students in the future...
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SWAnG
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Re: Highest Scores this Year

Post by SWAnG »

Another note: The teams who are complaining are those of the top ten. We attend COUNTLESS tournaments and MAKE SURE we follow the rules.
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Re: Highest Scores this Year

Post by killer225whale »

patil215 wrote: Seems as though this was directly violated by the arbitration committee then. We did not directly interpret the rules to gain an unfair advantage. We could have easily modified our device to be legal within an hour had we known, and the device would not have scored any less. Instead, we lost points and our appeal failed because we failed to interpret the "intent" of the rules clarification which is literally impossible for a competitor to predict.
If I remember the situation correctly, the primary problem was that you were interpreting two FAQs together. I believe that FAQs are answered independently; any answer you see to a single question applies only to that question. If you ask two "is it possible for..." questions, there may very well be scenarios in which each of them are possible, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they can BOTH be possible at the same time (in this case, they were mutually exclusive.) In addition, there were the listed requirements for earning points for Bonus ETS, which prevented scoring of one of those ETS. Neither of the FAQs on their own were inconsistent with those requirements listed in the rules. The interpretation of those two FAQs required combining them (I think the 'made-up quote' you saw on the appeals form was likely a paraphrasing of your interpretation of the combined FAQ). However, the two FAQs were independent of each other, and so therefore it was probably seen as an incorrect interpretation.

My advice would be to be more direct in the questions that are asked. I don't mean to go so far as to reach the point where the response would be "we can't prejudge your device" or something, but although this may not have been the case here, I know (having done so myself before) that many students may find a loophole, then submit vague, extremely general FAQs as a way to try and conceal what they want to do (for fear of causing the door to be closed.) Most of these are very innovative, out-of-the-box ideas, but mostly just be very careful, as there are probably good reasons why few others have thought of it yet. Heck, even before submitting those FAQs, re-read the rules and posted FAQs and clarifications to make sure that nothing currently bans what you're preventing.

What was so special about Table 8? All of the event supervisors were moving around and didn't specifically judge the same table.
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Re: Highest Scores this Year

Post by chalker »

killer225whale wrote: What was so special about Table 8? All of the event supervisors were moving around and didn't specifically judge the same table.
I should have been more clear in my statement: the judge who was shown in the picture as being at 'table 8' and ran the event at Wright State (but was not the lead event supervisor at Nationals), was involved in 3 appeals, 2 of which were denied.
patil215 wrote: Frankly, I'm extremely disappointed in the way this event was handled over this year. I've now had somewhat of a loss of faith in Science Olympiad as I have seen that hard work and the spririt of the competition are not always rewarded.
As are a lot of us 'on the other side'. If you've been following my posts in the MP threads, you'll know that we readily acknowledged a while ago there were issues and couldn't internally agree on the best way to address them. We came up with the 'least bad' solutions we could, none of which fully satisfied anyone. In all my years of being involved in SO, this was one of the most disappointing situations from my perspective as well - unfortunately sometimes that just happens.

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Re: Highest Scores this Year

Post by killer225whale »

chalker wrote: As are a lot of us 'on the other side'. If you've been following my posts in the MP threads, you'll know that we readily acknowledged a while ago there were issues and couldn't internally agree on the best way to address them. We came up with the 'least bad' solutions we could, none of which fully satisfied anyone. In all my years of being involved in SO, this was one of the most disappointing situations from my perspective as well - unfortunately sometimes that just happens.
Agreed.
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Re: Highest Scores this Year

Post by peartree423 »

Hey everyone! So my partner and I actually won this event this year and I wanted to put in my two cents. First of all, I TOTALLY agree that the student competitors should have a voice in the appeal process. As stated, it is sometimes quite hard to explain all the rules and the interpretation in question to a coach (who very well may know nothing about the event). This is especially true for an event like mission. It makes no sense to put the burden on the coach to try to explain the kids' views. As for our mission, the concept was almost identical to the 5th place mission (the one detailed on this forum). Our timer was smaller and not quite as accurate. We were two seconds too fast. All 6 ETS worked flawlessly. I can't guarantee that the following measurements are exactly what the judges measured at the competition, but I measure our device at 17.6 x 22.5 x 16.1. If I did the math correctly, our final score was about 1141.8
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Re: Highest Scores this Year

Post by blakinator8 »

peartree423 wrote:Hey everyone! So my partner and I actually won this event this year and I wanted to put in my two cents. First of all, I TOTALLY agree that the student competitors should have a voice in the appeal process. As stated, it is sometimes quite hard to explain all the rules and the interpretation in question to a coach (who very well may know nothing about the event). This is especially true for an event like mission. It makes no sense to put the burden on the coach to try to explain the kids' views. As for our mission, the concept was almost identical to the 5th place mission (the one detailed on this forum). Our timer was smaller and not quite as accurate. We were two seconds too fast. All 6 ETS worked flawlessly. I can't guarantee that the following measurements are exactly what the judges measured at the competition, but I measure our device at 17.6 x 22.5 x 16.1. If I did the math correctly, our final score was about 1141.8
Thanks for posting! My partner and I were curious about what the winning device was like. Congratulations!
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Re: Highest Scores this Year

Post by patil215 »

Interesting to hear. For comparison, our final score was 1096.2 with the 50 point ETS penalty, which got us 5th.
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