MIT Invitational

User avatar
antoine_ego
Exalted Member
Exalted Member
Posts: 387
Joined: May 24th, 2016, 5:37 pm
Division: Grad
State: MA
Has thanked: 0
Been thanked: 0

Re: MIT Invitational

Post by antoine_ego »

jkang wrote:
kenniky wrote:Oh, no, I assumed the difference was 2 points because I figured that it'd be somewhat close, the more leeway you allow the larger the potential max score is (although I would put the difference at no more than 5)
antoine_ego wrote:Well, I already got 35 on the test... The 39 is because we're guessing that the scores were reasonably close.
Iirc I talked to the supervisor right before he went in for score counseling and he said Troy won by a 17-point margin (/100), or somewhere along the lines of that. So I'd imagine the scores were not actually that close.
Wow, that would be impressive, and would still technically fit the calculations.
Rest in Peace Len Joeris
[b]2016 Air Trajectory Nationals - 3rd
2018 Hovercraft Nationals - 6th
2018 Mousetrap Nationals - 6th
2018 Nationals - Team 9th Place!
2019 Astronomy Nationals - 3rd!
2019 Nationals - Team 9th Place!
[/b]
Acton-Boxborough Regional High School Captain 17-19
User avatar
Unome
Moderator
Moderator
Posts: 4338
Joined: January 26th, 2014, 12:48 pm
Division: Grad
State: GA
Has thanked: 235 times
Been thanked: 85 times

Re: MIT Invitational

Post by Unome »

The ones from MIT (now that I've finally gotten around to posting this):

WIDI (16th) - pretty great. A mixture of several different types of materials; paper folding/cutting, drawing, pipe cleaners, pins, and that ridiculous piece of string (not to mention the four-cuts chair fold, which I just skipped entirely). Whereas last year's was more about being difficult to build in place (with it resting on the end of K'nex rods & connectors in a weird orientation) this year's was more about just being straight-up difficult to describe.

DyPlan (2nd) - Compared to what I was expecting, the multiple choice seemed a bit easy; I finished it in five minutes and missed 1 or 2 out of 25. However, the meat of the test was in the free-response, with 10 shorter problems and 5 longer ones, several of them very difficult or obscure (gravity anomalies!).

Disease (13th) - Same as in previous years, a great test. Pretty long, although somehow we got through the whole thing without splitting it. The use of actual articles was interesting, and the question difficulty varied well.

Astronomy (14th) - As usual a good covering of the test material and such, but (as with last year) easier and shorter than I'd consider appropriate for the tournament. If we had had any math skills during the tournament, we would have finished with at least ten minutes remaining for the 10 or so points of really difficult material (as it was, we totally blanked and got exactly 6 points on math).

Microbes (11th) - I can't really comment on this much because I don't really understand the event very well (we basically guessed our way through 60% of the test). More knowledge-based than I was expecting from looking at past nationals test.

Remote (13th) - Still pretty good by my standards because of all the low quality tests out there, but this one was a little disappointing. It was all free-response (<- not a criticism), and focused a lot on very specific things (e.g. a bunch of points for interpreting a Planck curve, listing out a bunch of measurements for a specific instrument), without much actual map-reading Edit: image interpreting (realized I said the wrong thing after reading windu's post). Also was a bit short, but that might just be because of the way it was written (with questions that were hard to guess on, so we ended up basically skipping).
Last edited by Unome on January 29th, 2017, 8:35 am, edited 2 times in total.
Userpage

Opinions expressed on this site are not official; the only place for official rules changes and FAQs is soinc.org.
User avatar
antoine_ego
Exalted Member
Exalted Member
Posts: 387
Joined: May 24th, 2016, 5:37 pm
Division: Grad
State: MA
Has thanked: 0
Been thanked: 0

Re: MIT Invitational

Post by antoine_ego »

Fyi, on the MIT tournament website, there is a link to the tests and answer keys for this year. However, it's password protected, and I can't seem to find it.
Rest in Peace Len Joeris
[b]2016 Air Trajectory Nationals - 3rd
2018 Hovercraft Nationals - 6th
2018 Mousetrap Nationals - 6th
2018 Nationals - Team 9th Place!
2019 Astronomy Nationals - 3rd!
2019 Nationals - Team 9th Place!
[/b]
Acton-Boxborough Regional High School Captain 17-19
User avatar
windu34
Staff Emeritus
Staff Emeritus
Posts: 1383
Joined: April 19th, 2015, 6:37 pm
Division: Grad
State: FL
Has thanked: 2 times
Been thanked: 40 times

Re: MIT Invitational

Post by windu34 »

Since Unome did it:
Electric Vehicle (3rd): Not very well run - supervisor didn't issue impound tickets and checking of device specs was lenient at best. Apparently the target was 20 cm to the left with respect to the starting point and can displacement reference point...

Hovercraft (24): Very well run and very good test. My formula for calculating current failed to provide useful data so I had to rely on wit for the time score portion.

Invasives (15): Same supervisor as last year so no surprise the test was mainly ecology and not at all like any of the other tests I will take the rest of the year (including nats). Good speed practice and well written, just bad focus.

Remote Sensing (16): Overall well written, but could have definitely used some more difficult application-based questions. Math was very straightforward. Test had way too many "straight from the cheat sheet" definition questions and statistic questions of instruments/platforms. Not nearly enough image interpretation.

Robot Arm (5th): Very well run. Amazing setup and great job on the supervisor's behalf.

Wind Power (6th): Supervisor(s) did not quite have it together and our teams turbine had another teams checklist on it (despite a clear "C12" marking). Test was very good and math was thorough. The last section was kinda dumb - they walked you through the calculation of the betz's limit - very confusing trying to figure out how to actually answer each question
Boca Raton Community High School Alumni
University of Florida Science Olympiad Co-Founder
Florida Science Olympiad Board of Directors
[email protected] || windu34's Userpage
User avatar
Adi1008
Moderator
Moderator
Posts: 526
Joined: December 6th, 2013, 1:56 pm
Division: Grad
State: CA
Pronouns: He/Him/His
Has thanked: 155 times
Been thanked: 108 times

Re: MIT Invitational

Post by Adi1008 »

antoine_ego wrote:Fyi, on the MIT tournament website, there is a link to the tests and answer keys for this year. However, it's password protected, and I can't seem to find it.
Your coach/sponsor should have received an email with the password
Stanford University
University of Texas at Austin '22
Seven Lakes High School '18
Beckendorff Junior High '14
kenniky
Member
Member
Posts: 283
Joined: January 21st, 2016, 6:16 pm
Division: Grad
State: MA
Has thanked: 0
Been thanked: 0

Re: MIT Invitational

Post by kenniky »

Sure

Chemistry Lab (5th) - Almost as long as Nationals, as usual. Lab was basic calorimetry, and like before there were a lot of pretty creative questions that pushed your knowledge to the limit. Overall well run, and the test was fun although, as always, in no way indicative of performances for the rest of the year.

Hovercraft (7th) - The track was pure sheet metal and thus really troll, super slippery so it was pretty difficult to go very slow. We managed to get really lucky and janked out the time score super hard. The test was pretty decent, although the fluid mechanics questions were pretty ridiculous (some Wind Power-esque stuff in there lol). I could have medaled if I had tried checking my answers more but I'm bad :/

Optics (19th) - Test was pretty good, straightforward with a couple of curveballs but nothing too esoteric (other than maybe Fabry-Perot cavities lol) The laser setup, however, was not that great - the mirrors were covered in tape and this resulted in the bottom front edge not being flush or even parallel with the actual mirrors. We set the mirrors up perfectly but the variation in angle from the tape made our laser completely miss the 4th mirror and caused us to get a laser score of 21 :/ Very salty

Also, is MIT not releasing scoresheets?
Automated Event Assigner!
UMich 2018: Chem Lab, Fermi

[url=http://tinyurl.com/kenniky-so-test]Rate my tests![/url]
[url]https://scioly.org/wiki/index.php/User:Kenniky[/url]

[url=https://scioly.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=10008&start=34]2017 Nats = rip[/url]
[url=https://youtu.be/MCo8IAovjfw]ABRHS 2016[/url]
User avatar
Adi1008
Moderator
Moderator
Posts: 526
Joined: December 6th, 2013, 1:56 pm
Division: Grad
State: CA
Pronouns: He/Him/His
Has thanked: 155 times
Been thanked: 108 times

Re: MIT Invitational

Post by Adi1008 »

Astronomy (1): Well done, as always, although on the easier (and much shorter!) side, especially when compared to last year's nationals (and MIT) test. However, still a lot of cool and new information and was a pleasure to take. I wish there was more conceptual/research papers stuff like last year's (it was mainly DSOs/categorizing and math this year), but they might be starting out easy since it's the first year of this topic. I thought the categorizing towards the end of part I was really great and the math problems were pretty interesting, for the most part. Slightly off topic, but it was nice of them (and everyone else in the time block) to start a bit later since I was around 10 minutes late due to hovercraft impound taking a while.

WIDI (2): Excellently done. This structure was pretty hard and time consuming for both the writer and doer (contrasted with last year's structure, which was an incredibly short and easy k'nex structure). I thought the ripped paper parts were pretty creative and the string was a pain to deal with (which is good, as it makes it a hard structure!). The drawing was a nice addition, as it is rarely tested, too. Another small touch I liked was how when you finished, you put your structure in another room (instead of out in the open like last year), keeping people from looking at other's completed structures. All in all, a great structure and a very well run event.

Picture This (2): Run perfectly fine. Words felt fairly hard, but that's mainly because a lot of them were biology related and I'm abysmal at biology

Hovercraft (5): The proctors were incredibly knowledgeable and competent for this and it was overall a great experience. The tracks were really well set up, although the metal track did mess my timing up a lot (which isn't the proctors' fault at all, of course); overall, the building/testing part was flawless. The test was harder than any other hovercraft test I had seen before which was pretty awesome (but not impossibly hard by any stretch). It felt like there was a disproportionately high amount of fluids/water/hydraulics type questions and rotational motion and not enough basic mechanics/dynamics etc, but all in all, the test was fine. Nationals will be in good hands with these same people running it.

Optics (15): The test was fine, although it included some fairly obscure stuff at times (which isn't necessarily a bad thing). I'll never really understand why significant figures are important in an event like optics though; you only got half credit if you didn't use correct sig figs. The laser shoot was run fairly well, for the most part (the proctor had a really cool camera and computer setup to measure distances and stuff), but the build of the actual LSSs tripped my partner and I up. We align mirrors by holding templates and rulers against the sides of the LSS, but there were gaps between the bottom and the sides of the LSS, meaning that the rulers and templates would slide in the gaps and therefore not measure angles correctly, since they weren't aligned to a straight edge. This was a huge, huge problem for my partner and I and ended up messing up our laser shoot quite a bit, since we had to eyeball a lot of stuff. Additionally, the covers for the mirrors were a hassle to work with (since they got in the way a lot when aligning the mirrors), but I liked that they were very easy to remove, reducing the chances of the mirrors unintentionally shifting positions when the competitors have to remove the covers once time is up.
kenniky wrote:Also, is MIT not releasing scoresheets?
There's the avogadro one, but that's not really a printable scoresheet or anything. However, there is an unofficial one thanks to Unome/Chattahoochee
Stanford University
University of Texas at Austin '22
Seven Lakes High School '18
Beckendorff Junior High '14
Uber
Member
Member
Posts: 58
Joined: October 1st, 2015, 4:33 pm
Division: C
State: TX
Has thanked: 0
Been thanked: 0

Re: MIT Invitational

Post by Uber »

Anatomy (2nd): Pretty good test. Tested certain parts like general senses too much, but it touched on most systems. Multiple choice was tricky and most questions were well written. I would've preferred more disease questions, but they were sufficient. 60 minutes were given, and the test was not very long, so time was not a problem. The grading, however, contained numerous mistakes due both to human error and answer key errors.

Ecology (1st): Incredibly difficult test, since most questions were either short answer or multiple multiple choice (no partial credit). Lots of nitpicky stuff like random acronym names and obscure information made the test really hard to finish. True/false questions tested understanding of concepts really well. Overall, a unique test that's harder than any other ecology or green generation test I've taken.

Experimental Design (1st): Unique experiment as far as I've done. The laser pointer was fun to play around with :D Write-up was done without a template, which is nice because of more freedom to write. No glitches.

Microbe Mission (1st): Well written test. Test started out easy and got progressively more difficult. Most questions were typical of a microbe test, some interesting disease sections. Has a bit too much immune system for a microbe test The immune system chart had either/or answers with questions that nobody actually knew, which made much of the score difference random.
Harvard '22
Liberal Arts and Science Academy '18
kenniky
Member
Member
Posts: 283
Joined: January 21st, 2016, 6:16 pm
Division: Grad
State: MA
Has thanked: 0
Been thanked: 0

Re: MIT Invitational

Post by kenniky »

Adi1008 wrote:
kenniky wrote:Also, is MIT not releasing scoresheets?
There's the avogadro one, but that's not really a printable scoresheet or anything. However, there is an unofficial one thanks to Unome/Chattahoochee
I meant like individual build scoresheets, so we can see how others did. EV, Helicopters, Hovercraft, Optics, Robot Arm, and Towers all have scoresheets and I would have liked to know how we fared versus the other teams (and how much the stupid Optics laser shoot cost us >:( )
Automated Event Assigner!
UMich 2018: Chem Lab, Fermi

[url=http://tinyurl.com/kenniky-so-test]Rate my tests![/url]
[url]https://scioly.org/wiki/index.php/User:Kenniky[/url]

[url=https://scioly.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=10008&start=34]2017 Nats = rip[/url]
[url=https://youtu.be/MCo8IAovjfw]ABRHS 2016[/url]
User avatar
windu34
Staff Emeritus
Staff Emeritus
Posts: 1383
Joined: April 19th, 2015, 6:37 pm
Division: Grad
State: FL
Has thanked: 2 times
Been thanked: 40 times

Re: MIT Invitational

Post by windu34 »

kenniky wrote:
Adi1008 wrote:
kenniky wrote:Also, is MIT not releasing scoresheets?
There's the avogadro one, but that's not really a printable scoresheet or anything. However, there is an unofficial one thanks to Unome/Chattahoochee
I meant like individual build scoresheets, so we can see how others did. EV, Helicopters, Hovercraft, Optics, Robot Arm, and Towers all have scoresheets and I would have liked to know how we fared versus the other teams (and how much the stupid Optics laser shoot cost us >:( )
Ive already asked. They wont give them out
Boca Raton Community High School Alumni
University of Florida Science Olympiad Co-Founder
Florida Science Olympiad Board of Directors
[email protected] || windu34's Userpage
Locked

Return to “2017 Invitationals, Regionals, and States”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest