poonicle wrote:Magikarpmaster629 wrote:I'll update this post with more info later, but I have a lot of advice for teams having graded most of the tests at MIT. Only the top four teams were not tiered as most did not understand what 'racing' means.
Honestly, I was quite confused by some of the grading... Did the ES use
https://www.soinc.org/sites/default/fil ... lained.pdf to grade? As an example of something that confused my partner and me when we got our rubrics back, the linked rubric awards 1 point for having a default starting position of sprite under "sprite orientation," but we got 0 points for that part.
As for the "racing" game, I believe the confusion was in the "two-player" portion. Most competitors assumed that two-player meant player vs. player, not 2 players vs. an autonomous sprite (this is the sense that I got from our school's B team)
So we had around 10 people grading tests at one point, and I was the main grader. There wasn't enough time to properly teach them how to grade, but I believe they were all using the rubric. If I was grading your test I would have given you one point for using any sort of orientation at all (e.g. one team had just a flag sprite with no sense of orientation, so they got a zero for that) and I would have given you a second if the orientation changed during the game while still functioning well (iirc I gave the AB b-team two points for orientation but I'm not sure).
You are correct on the bit on racing. It was a bit misleading that it was included with the two player, but as with the other topics they're meant to be single player in the first place, with two player being an additional topic so they must have both.
Some other things/advice from helping run the event:
-The highest score was Troy A's with a score in the 80's (I'm hesitant to say exactly). From what I remember, all untiered teams still had very high scores and would have been ranked pretty high if not as high as they were if we did not take tiers into account.
-A lot of teams missed points simply for not including simple things. If they put in any sounds at all, even if it's just a single button click we gave one point on the sounds section. Even if it's much uglier, a custom sprite automatically gets two points while a stock sprite is limited to one.
-The ES told me she chose the theme to be as broad as possible so we wouldn't be playing the same games while grading. In the end, there were probably around 45-55 recycling games, with most of the rest being 'energy' related. Only one stood out to me, and that was Troy B's conservation of quantum color. I know there are only four available points for creativity, but when you've been grading for eight hours and come across the 10th Recycle Rush in a row, you're certainly more likely to dock points for things that might not otherwise be counted off for. Think outside the box a little!
-We're really sorry for how poorly the event was run in especially the first two time slots. This event was disaster after disaster after disaster, from the door being locked to only having one computer able to log in at a time to not being able to download Scratch to grading half an hour into awards. It makes me curious as to how many events typically go bad at tournaments that I couldn't tell as a competitor...
Feel free to reply to this or send me a PM with other questions/concerns/etc. If anyone wants their game back I believe you can contact the ES for that, but if her contact info is not available to you then send me a PM.