Fluorine wrote:I would argue that it is more to do with the fact that Florida itself is not that competive of state in scioly compeititons, really only Boca High has placed consistently high at nationals and the same two teams have qualfied for nats in the past few years. This creates less of a need for teams to use resources such as scioly.org or SSSS. Furthermore, it sets a standard within the state that directors and supervisor (not all) feel less necessity to run super high quality tournaments/inviationals or don't even have the expereince to know how to run a tournmanet at that level. I just think it is important to contexualize as a whole the science olympiad atmosphere in florida and understand that this affects other things such as user involvement here.jaah5211 wrote:Correction. Oss will be going to centerville not solon. However, I think centerville is also a good indicator of the performance of our Division B team. Also, I do agree with Kevin about certain invitationals not serving as a good indicator of performance. Some tournaments in Georgia from my experience were not well run. The test qualities were questionable and the keys seem to be incorrect for few events. However, OSS invitational's quality is increasing and hopefully increases to point where it may serve as a good indicator. As captains, we will make sure that the tests qualities are state to maybe national level for each events. However, when we ask other schools to write tests for certain events, then it becomes quite difficult to control the quality. I think this problem of not being able to write a "good " tests comes from Florida's lack of participation in scioly events such as SSSS. When moderating, it was pretty clear that I saw no submissions from Florida and it was quite sad. Participating in events like these tremendously help when writing tests as the moderators point out mistakes and give general comments on how to make a better or higher quality tests. Even as a moderator I learned so much from other moderators that helped to run the 2018 SSSS. Hopefully we will see increase in Florida's participation in events like these, but it may take long time.
And as windu said above. Good to see the Florida page with new users active, keep up the discussion! I may be a grad but I still check scioly.org here and there
Boca Raton has been amazing ever since 2011. But at 2018 states, they got second... They lost to Archimedean Upper Conservatory, which was surprising to everybody obviously. But Boca Raton isn't really considered a competitive school anymore to most people down here in Florida. They still did good at nationals though.
On the other hand in Division B, it has definitely been getting more competitive. River City came in out of nowhere last year at states and won and now Galaxy beating River City in the OSS Invite. OSS has really stepped up their game and has been pretty strong at every invitational so far. Archimedean is going to participate in their first invitational (of this year) on December 15th. Right now in Florida, I believe the top tier Div B teams are, 1. OSS, 2. Galaxy, #3. River City, and #4 . Archimedean.
Galaxy is definitely a top tier school when it comes to building events. I'd say the best in Florida, but when it comes to academics I believe that's where they fall short. It's going to be much of a rivalry between the bottom 3 schools, but I can almost guarantee if OSS keeps up their work. They will do amazing at every competition that comes to them.
PS. I have never seen this much activity on the Florida forums before
We are more hopeful in Division B, bringing almost the entire team from last year. But I must say you count your chickens way before they become an egg.
