Science Olympiad at Penn Invitational 2019

[Unome]

You could superstack each state... Solon and Mason, Troy and Mira Loma, WWP North and South...

Unlike the other schools, WW-P North and South are in the same school district.

A hypothetical WW-P high school would almost certainly lose to Troy. I would expect them to be competitive for top 6 at Nationals though.

Sounds about right. Remember that stacking assumes that conflicts do not happen. Stacking always overestimates performance, and stacking four teams and expecting the absolute best performance is well outside the realm of possibility.

Given North's and South's strong performance in various areas though, I would expect competitiveness at the top 3 at nationals.

I wouldn't go so far as to say manual stacking always overestimates performance, since I've seen plenty of individual events where a stacked team would do a lot better, but on average I agree.

[IcsTam]

In the same vein as the others, I’m the ES for Sounds. Would love to hear feedback — feel free to PM me!

[will926ok3645]

My quick review:

Experimental Design: My only complaint was the limited space for each team in the room, but that's simply me being picky. We had enough room to work but more space is a common thing teams want. The event supervisor was extremely nice and the event was run extremely smoothly.

Forensics: Another very well-run event. The proctors were very nice and although the controlled burns for plastics did not help me, it was something interesting to watch and was a cool addition to the test. Having each team place the plastic density solutions in their own beakers was an ingenious idea to eliminate contamination for the solutions. The test was fun and the event ran extremely smoothly.

Water Quality: My personal opinion is that water should not be a station event unless there are additional questions on the salinometer section. Despite this, the test was of extremely high quality, which seemed to be a theme across most events at SOUP. The test was challenging and brought together an abundance of practical application questions and knowledge questions. Some stations were certainly longer than others, which made it unfortunate when you would finish a station with ~1 minute left while there were questions left on the previous station. The event was really well run and I enjoyed the test a lot.

There was a lot of complaints about Code and the inability to write on the test, but that's not my place to comment. The awards ceremony being split into two rooms was disappointing and unfortunate, but as I am not aware of the logistical challenges behind awards, O'm not going to comment further. Awards ran smoothly despite the two rooms being used.

[pepperonipi]

Thoughts on events:

Fermi: Much easier test than last year and was quite plain and straightforward. Might not have enough differentiating material for the top teams and I expect there to be little difference in raw scores at the top. Still a pretty solid test. 6.5/10

Codebusters: It should be a rule that competitors must be allowed to write on tests. I understand that some schools are antsy with organizations printing so many tests and the use of such a large amount of paper, but at least for this event and especially the timed question, writing on the test is ESSENTIAL. Thoroughly frustrated that the timed question was even more weighted here since if you were able to ID the quote, you didn't need to rewrite the question on the scrap paper (in my opinion, the timed questions is overweighted) to solve, compounding the issue. Frequency tables were also not given, making it more annoying to solve problem, though less of an issue since there weren't many long quotes. If anyone solved the xenocrypt, then you're amazing - having the same exact letter pattern as "blanca" and getting that the word is "franca" in a poem about cultivating white roses made it terribly difficult to solve the problem. 6/10 (understanding that SOUP does not have full control over printing copies of tests).

Definitely agree with the thoughts on Fermi and Code. Some questions on Fermi were questions that are commonly memorized, making them easy grabs, which was good if you knew them.

With Code, I 100% agree that there should be some sort of rule in place that we have to be able to write on the tests, just because it's so essential. Also, the test was a little weird with the large amount of abstract questions you typically don't find on a test, including two entire pages filled with information about some algorithm not on the rubric. I haven't seen a Code test like it. Also, the timed question was definitely a little messed up - a team in our block got it in less than 2 minutes and the actual code was like 4 lines long, meaning that there's no way they could have found it without knowing it beforehand.

Thermo: The test was relatively straightforward and there weren't too many curveballs. I didn't notice any problems with the device part of the event, and the setup for impound was well put together. It was well done in my opinion.

[jaggie34]

Thermo: The test was relatively straightforward and there weren't too many curveballs. I didn't notice any problems with the device part of the event, and the setup for impound was well put together. It was well done in my opinion.

I agree that impound went well and the test was high quality, however we had some issues with the device testing. The ES decided to leave in the thermometer and did announce this prior to impound. However, when the thermometer was put in and they attempted to put the cottonball in to plug the hole, they instead put the cotton ball partially covering the top of the hole. I noticed that some teams did not have this issue but was wondering if anyone else had this impact their prediction or heat score?

[GoldenKnight1]

Thoughts on events:
Codebusters: ...understanding that SOUP does not have full control over printing copies of tests).

I don't understand what you mean by they don't have full control over printing the tests? This issue of only have a set of tests for each time block seems to be a common thing with many university held invitationals. If it is a money thing I am sure most teams would be willing to add a few extra dollars to the registration fee to cover the cost. If it is an environmental thing then why not copy the first half and second half of the test in two separate packets.

And regarding Codebusters specifically, with just a little change in format you could have used the test packet as the answer sheet, not had to print an answer sheet, and thus used got to write on the test with using almost the same amount of paper.

[JustMonika]

Hi all! I was one of the ESs for protein modeling at SOUP. Would love to get feedback from you all. Hope you enjoyed the tournament!

For the onsite build however (I was my team's builder), I wish more invitationals did what MIT did and came up with their own onsite build w/ substitute materials rather than using MSOE's standard invitational build portion, as most teams would have had prior experience with the section (I know my team did). The section MSOE picked for this year's onsite is also ridiculously short at only 47 amino acids, so it doesn't really present much difficulty at all and as a builder, I feel like it doesn't give that much opportunity to differentiate between great builders on different teams. Finally, using MSOE's tests means that teams can't get their score breakdown back and only receive the onsite test score, which is really frustrating.

For the test, judging by what my teammates said (I wasn't one of the test takers), it was a pretty difficult test which matches the overall quality of SOUP. However, the biophysics-like part of the test was kinda strange, because that's not really part of the event and probably gave people who did biophysics at MIT an unfair advantage (like my teammates).

Overall though, the event ran really smoothly and was pretty quality! Thanks so much for organizing the invitational -- if I wasn't a senior I'd love to compete again next year!

[will0416]

Codebusters: It should be a rule that competitors must be allowed to write on tests. I understand that some schools are antsy with organizations printing so many tests and the use of such a large amount of paper, but at least for this event and especially the timed question, writing on the test is ESSENTIAL. Thoroughly frustrated that the timed question was even more weighted here since if you were able to ID the quote, you didn't need to rewrite the question on the scrap paper (in my opinion, the timed questions is overweighted) to solve, compounding the issue. Frequency tables were also not given, making it more annoying to solve problem, though less of an issue since there weren't many long quotes. If anyone solved the xenocrypt, then you're amazing - having the same exact letter pattern as "blanca" and getting that the word is "franca" in a poem about cultivating white roses made it terribly difficult to solve the problem. 6/10 (understanding that SOUP does not have full control over printing copies of tests).

Code was very iffy in how it was run at SOUP; I agree 100%. First of all, I'm against any kind of lecture hall room choice for Codebusters as there is so much riding on teamwork and I had to take the test balancing my calculator on my legs as there wasn't really any room for that whatsoever. I'm not exactly against the timed question weighting or absence of frequency tables (though I might be biased here because the TQ carried us to a 4th after we choked on the rest of the test) but I concur on the xenocrypt; My partner was having a ton of trouble with it. Lastly, I was definitely disappointed that we couldn't write on the test because it forced us to waste so much time transcribing and took 1 great mind away from us during the timed question, which we could have potentially solved faster if we had been able to write directly on the paper instead of 2 of us grinding away while the 3rd wrote it down on the answer sheet.

[will0416]

I'm not exactly sure that the test was graded correctly either, because our test had a bunch of 0's marked on questions we had obviously gotten right and our total score ended up being lower than what the timed question should have given us in the first place. Not going to say the actual score but maybe the 0's could have been for 0 letters wrong but they added 0 points instead by accident when grading? I'm just really confused.

[Raleway]

Thoughts on events:
Codebusters: ...understanding that SOUP does not have full control over printing copies of tests).

I don't understand what you mean by they don't have full control over printing the tests? This issue of only have a set of tests for each time block seems to be a common thing with many university held invitationals. If it is a money thing I am sure most teams would be willing to add a few extra dollars to the registration fee to cover the cost. If it is an environmental thing then why not copy the first half and second half of the test in two separate packets.

And regarding Codebusters specifically, with just a little change in format you could have used the test packet as the answer sheet, not had to print an answer sheet, and thus used got to write on the test with using almost the same amount of paper.

I have no clue; the proctors I spoke with said they didn't hold control over that (might be an oversight issue). However, the second suggestion is quite valid - I hope more people see that and use it.