Menomonie Science Olympiad Invitational

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BennyTheJett
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Menomonie Science Olympiad Invitational

Post by BennyTheJett »

Hello! In light of Wisconsin cancelling our regional tournaments, Menomonie has decided to create an invitational when our regionals would normally be. The tentative date of the tournament is Saturday, March 13th. You can email me, [email protected] for tournament information, or find me on Discord (BennyTheJett1#3979, am also in the Scioly.org Discord) with any tournament related questions. If you are looking for a smaller late season tournament to attend before states, you may be interested. Just thought I'd spread the information around. If our current Covid-19 situation holds out, this will be a Satellite Tournament or a Mini Tournament. Teams can switch between as needed. This tournament is open to both Divisions (B and C).

Note: We are following Wisconsin Science Olympiad rules, so we will run 28 events (the same 23 national events plus 5 Wisconsin trials), and then we will drop your 5 lowest scores of all your events.

Registration: We're charging 60 dollars/team for registration.


Sign Up Link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIp ... g/viewform
Scilympiad Registration: https://scilympiad.com/wi-menomonie/Reg
Last edited by BennyTheJett on January 14th, 2021, 11:56 am, edited 5 times in total.
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Re: Menomonie Science Olympiad Invitational

Post by BennyTheJett »

Correction: This tournament will offer Ping Pong Parachute and the Flight events, and will drop your lowest 7 event scores to determine team ranking. Apologies for the confusion.
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Re: Menomonie Science Olympiad Invitational

Post by azboy1910 »

Hello! I hope everyone has had a wonderful day! Yesterday, I helped grade and write the exam for the event. I wasn't able to supervise this event due to a conflicting invitational I was competing in that day. I'd like to thank BennyTheJett, who offered me to write for this invitational and let me grade as well. I'd like to also thank everyone who participated and everyone who helped organize and make this tournament possible. Congratulations to everyone who participated! One more person I'd like to thank is gz839918, who helped check over my test and made sure that everything was of good quality and this wouldn't have been possible without him.

Review
I had a great time writing for this event, this being my second time I have written for an invitational. This test was not meant to be super long with 60 questions, but also attempted to make students use their critical thinking skills rather than just memorizing information. Grading completely for the first time was a bit more difficult than I had expected, even though I only graded 12 teams. I had a bit of trouble on how to grade some answers and was forced to use my best judgement. Even though my grading skills were probably not the best, this experience helped me learn a bit on how grading works, rather than last time I wrote for an invitational where I just checked over and made sure everything was graded correctly.

The test was split into three sections, with Section A being worth 20 points, Section B being worth 10 points, and Section C being worth 100 points. Section C was the main section that attempted to make students use their critical thinking skills. The highest score was lower than I had expected and responses in my feedback form indicated that I had made the test too difficult, which was not exactly my intention.

I believe that I did a pretty good job of writing and grading for my second time ever, but there were definitely things I could've done better in. There were also a few mistakes in the answer key. These mistakes will be pointed out in a document in a Google Drive folder I will be posting on my SciOly.org wiki userpage that will also contain the test and answer key very soon!

Histogram and Score Distribution
Image Image

Contact Info
As said before, the test and answer key will be released publicly on my wiki userpage soon. If you have any questions, concerns, or notice mistakes on this test or in grading, please feel free to email me at [email protected] or PM me! I’ll do my best to answer everything and apologize if it takes a while. If you'd like to give feedback, please fill out this form: https://forms.gle/A6UcgMcpNBRNqWjYA

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Edit: I just posted the drive folder with the exam/key, mistakes I made and notes about the test in my wiki userpage! Scroll to the very bottom to find it. Hope y'all enjoy!
Last edited by azboy1910 on March 14th, 2021, 8:13 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Menomonie Science Olympiad Invitational

Post by BennyTheJett »

I would like to personally apologize for the awards delay. There were significant issues on our end with the live stream and school internet/firewall. I hope things went ok for you all, and that you enjoyed your tournament!

In other news I was the Dynamic Planet B writer, and any questions about the test can be directed to me, and I will answer them promptly.
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Re: Menomonie Science Olympiad Invitational

Post by CPScienceDude »

Crime Busters Supervisor Review
Hi everyone! Crime Busters Supervisor here!

First, the obligatory thanks. Thanks to BennyTheJett for reaching out and letting me write for this invitational! Also, thanks to Jaspattack for reviewing some of the content of my test for quality and ease of use! It genuinely helped me polish the test for competition day. So, I competed in crime busters in 8th grade and now have done forensics for 2 years and these are two of my absolute favorite events in Science Olympiad. With that being said, I absolutely love writing tests for Crime Busters and Forensics because of how creative you can get with them.

Post-Invite Thoughts
So there were a few things I would like to say since this invite finished now. First, a couple of teams had issues with the embedded youtube videos. This was my fault completely, as I didn't put a note in the instructions that there would be embedded youtube videos, allowing competitors to switch devices so that their school firewall wouldn't block them. I'll definitely keep this in mind for any future online invitationals to avoid this issue again. Secondly, I was thoroughly impressed by the top 5 teams' performances on the test, especially the first place team! It was such a pleasure to be able to award so many points for questions I thought were very difficult for division B competitors. Lastly, I want to remind teams, don't forget motives! Motives are super important to solidifying suspicions, and missing motives, or worse, misinterpreting them, can lead to a false accusation very easily. With that being said, only 5 of the teams correctly identified the perpetrator. I designed the test so that it was super easy to accuse someone incorrectly if evidence was misidentified, so keep practicing your ID and motives!

Score Distros
Image

Final Thoughts
If you would like to take a look at the test, answer key, or anything else, the test folder is linked here. You can also reach out to me here by DMing me or on discord by adding Illusion#4497! Thanks again to everyone!
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Re: Menomonie Science Olympiad Invitational

Post by jaspattack »

Heredity Supervisor Review

Howdy, everyone! I wrote Heredity for Menomonie this year, and I wanted to take a moment to talk about how things went. I'll be the first to admit that this test was not without its issues -- some questions lacked clarity, and others were inaccurate or otherwise misleading. I've taken note of these errors and fixed them on the PDF version of my test, released on my userpage. I also wanted to take a moment to thank BennyTheJett for reaching out and giving me the opportunity to write Heredity, since it's been really fun! I first wrote Heredity for Socorro and I really liked being able to return to the event for Menomonie. So, without further ado:

The Review
This test was very short. This was largely intentional, since this was a much smaller invitational than I'm used to writing for and I didn't think writing a 100 question slog would be fun for anyone involved. The test ended up having *50 questions and 72 points, with 30 multiple choice questions and 20 short answer questions. I made up for its diminutive length by asking some more difficult questions in the SAQ section, largely to keep teams working the whole time and to separate teams better.

*One fill-in-the-blank question was unintentionally repeated, so to avoid double jeopardy this question was thrown out while grading. The question was altered in the PDF release of this test.

ImageImage

The highest score was around an 83%, which was pretty good! There were several teams that finished the test, but it looks like a lot of questions kept people stumped. The histogram was kind of bimodal, which I mostly expected. I think the distribution would look a lot better if there was a bigger sample size of teams, since only 14 teams took the test. (Also yes, I know the labels on the charts are kind of bad. I just didn't want to reupload them after I wrote my entire review.)

Conclusion
Thanks for taking the test, if you took it! The release PDF can be found on my userpage, which is linked on my forums signature. The PDF version has some alterations for clarity, and also to correct some of the errors I made on the Scilympiad version of the test. If you have any feedback, feel free to reach out to me here on the forums through a private message, or through a direct message on Discord (spinch#4931). Have a great rest of your day!
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Re: Menomonie Science Olympiad Invitational

Post by RiverWalker88 »

Hey everyone! I was the event supervisor for Reach for the Stars at Menomonie this year. It was a lot of fun--huge thanks to BennyTheJett and to everyone who helped put it together. I have included the score distribution and histogram below, although the small size of the tournament (which I really appreciated when grading) makes these slightly more difficult to analyze. This test was definitely difficult, and, despite the large point range, there were still some cases where teams were a little close for complete comfort (of course, I'm always paranoid about that haha).

TL;DR Great tournament! This was a tough test, great job to everyone, you did really good. I would suggest a little bit of work on spectra and metallicity of spectral types of stars, and maybe a little touching up on the ID/random recall section (although I think I messed that one up... my bad). Use partial credit if you can, and pay attention to units in calculation questions. Congrats to everyone!
MenomonieRFTSScores.jpg
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Overreaching Comments
I'm still working on gauging this exam thing, so this test was definitely too long (although slightly shorter than Socorro), and still imperfect in lots of ways. I had issues with vague wording, or some little--but in some cases slightly impactful--oversights (fixed in the final test). Additionally, this test was (unintentionally) slightly skewed toward a single concept; if your strategy was,"When it doubt, it probably has something to do with interstellar dust," well… that was a good strategy for this particular test, to say the least.

Section Breakdown
Section A was the easiest overall, but did have a couple of difficult questions. Notably, only a handful of teams got 9 (metallicity of stars) and 15 (stellar populations in galactic structures), and 7 (reading star charts, which was surpring) proved to be difficult, as well.

Section B was, and has always been, my least favorite in the event: Brute force ID and meaningless fact recall. I mostly included it for teams that had gone through and done that research so that their work didn't go too much to waste. I guess I had some more obscure images or something, though, because this section actually turned out to be the most difficult section (quite to my surprise). It may have been my fault that it was bad, butI would still encourage some work on it, as this is a pretty major part of the event in some tournaments. But yeah, sorry for the probably really, really bad ID section (and sorry about the blue dot star ID, that one may have been a little tricky)…

Section C had the bulk of the questions: Stars & DSOs. A lot of this section consisted of looking at a DSO, answering questions about it, and drawing conclusions about it. I often asked for answer justification so that I could evaluate your thought process, as that is mainly what I wanted to test you on. I was fairly lenient on grading in this section, as a lot of it was meant to be educated guessing or application, and when that is involved, I can't expect to get the same exact answer every time.

Some notably difficult questions: 25.a (34 on scilympiad), 28.b (42 on scilympiad), and 29.c (46 on scilympiad). I feel like 25.a was my fault for being unclear with the image I gave, my apologies. 28.b was definitely very difficult; it discussed Herbig-Haro objects in protostars… a more obscure topic, although fairly interesting if you decide to look into that. 29.c discussed metallicity of spectral types, although applied to interstellar dust absorbing light. Given the current data, I would recommend looking into chemical composition and spectra of spectral classes, that seemed to be a general weakness overall.

Section D was the interpretive tasks. These were a lot of classification or reading from an H-R diagram, along with the good ol' mathematical questions. For these mathematical questions, I gave partial credit when work was shown. For the first one (Lightbulbs, Type Ia Supernovae, and the Impending (Theoretical) Destruction of Humankind), some teams had something wrong with the distance modulus (no idea what it was), so they got the same wrong answer for distance, making me panic a little bit and double-check my work about 9 times. Having this wrong distance would have impacted the rest of the answers on the supernova question, which could result in a lot of lost points if you didn't show your work (I did not intend to make a question so reliant on double-jepoardy, but in the future if you encounter one of these, it might be a good idea to show your work to try to maximize your points earned). Another error I saw a lot with mathematical questions: be careful with your units!
The supernova calculation question had some interesting results. Our inner destructive selves got to determine that a supernova set off at a distance such that it would be as bright as the sun at peak luminosity would have a shockwave that impacted Earth with a kinetic energy equivalent to ~100 megatons of TNT [i]per square meter[/i]! That essentially equates to obliteration in my book. It was kind of fun to fathom.
Final Comments
Another thank-you to everyone who made this tournament possible, it was a lot of fun to supervise and ran just about flawlessly! Congratulations to everyone who competed, you all did really impressive overall with this test--it was very much intended to be difficult, and you all rose to the challenge well. It was really, really cool seeing you draw the same conclusions about an object that professional astronomers did with some given evidence (I cheered a couple of times when a team got a particularly difficult one--probably to the dismay of whoever was nearby at the time). Feel free to get in touch with me with any questions or feedback. Good luck at any future tournaments you have, and continue to reach for the stars!

I'm currently finishing revisions to the test/answer key. Check back in a a day or two to this post and/or my userpage, and it should be linked. I wanted to get this post out ASAP, but I also wanted to make sure the exam has most of my signature dumb mistakes ironed out. Sorry about the delay...
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Re: Menomonie Science Olympiad Invitational

Post by sAkEtH »

Hey everyone! I was the ES for Disease Detectives B. Too lazy to post a test review, but here's the test: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing
And here's a histo:
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