Poorly Run Event Stories

For anything Science Olympiad-related that might not fall under a specific event or competition.
RiverWalker88
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Re: Poorly Run Event Stories

Post by RiverWalker88 »

Just realized I have a couple of stories from this season I could share here. I probably sound like a broken record at this point, but I do believe that it is important for me to note that I am extremely grateful for all of the volunteers who contributed to the events I'm going to mention here. Event supervising is a really difficult thing, and it's easy to make mistakes. Despite my possible frustration during the event with how it turned out, or what happened, I am really grateful for these volunteers, and I appreciate their contribution. So, without further ado, here are some event stories that I hope can be of use for future ESs.

First, some of my mistakes
  • October SMEC Machines: I got to learn a very valuable lesson here: Write the key before the event gets run. Impossible problems, confusing wording, conflicting diagrams, and more problems happened here! Writing the key gives you a chance to look over your exam and fix mistakes, and slightly more importantly, helps you make sure that a problem isn't really, really awful.
  • Pearl City Machines: The exam here also had its issues, but it wasn't as bad as the October SMEC, so I won't focus on those. Instead, here's an error that is pretty much only encountered online. It starts with a usual error, one question didn't have a correct answer choice. So, for Division C, I just threw that question out. However, Division B had that same question with that same error, and that event wasn't going to run yet for another couple of hours, so I figured I'd jump in and try to change the answer choice to be correct for them. Now, the major issue turned out to be that the answer choices didn't update for everyone. Rather than having teams refresh, I just asked teams to chat me their answer if it didn't show up. BAD IDEA. And to make the situation worse, I only changed one answer choice, so if a team had one partner with the updated choices and another partner with the incorrect ones, it was obvious what the answer was. In the future, I would (a) just throw the question out, or (b) change ALL answer choices so I can just have teams refresh and/or I can post what the choices are supposed to be in the chat box without accidentally giving an advantage to a team who it wasn't updated for. Now, granted, this was just one question, and I threw it out, but I now know for future reference what I should do.
Now, some from other competitions
  • Regionals Codybusters: The event overall was too short, 13 questions, but that wasn't the big problem here. My main issue was in the good ol' Cursed Spanish Caesar Cipher. It was set up like a xenocrypt, but supposedly was a shift cipher, except that the ~Ns were all autofilled to that letter. In the same question, the English translation had also been appended after the Spanish version with a different shift key or something crazy like that, and it was just a super confusing and completely unexpected. Creative, but way outside what the rules allow and a little bit out of left field.
  • Regionals Astronomy: Astronomy is a hard event for everyone, ES and competitor alike. I appreciate all of the effort the ES put into this event. DSOs from last year were used (the Three Quasars showed up...), giving someone like me, who did it last year, an inherent advantage. As I went through the exam, I noticed a couple of questions that seemed vaguely familiar and I couldn't put my finger on why. Then, I read one particular one, and it clicked. These were the exact questions from the SSSS Astronomy test I wrote, and that gave us an advantage for very clear reasons. Just another reason that direct copying from exams isn't a good idea. On top of this, there were a couple of questions that did not have correct answer choices (we just did our best and got lucky), and a couple of questions that had two identical answer choices. And one last really minor thing I'll bring up. There was a free-response question that would be graded only in the event of a tie. It was long and took effort to answer. We had plenty of time to answer it, but for the effort that was put into it, I would have appreciated some credit for the problem. Minor issue, though, and I realize that there are reasons for not wanting to grade it. Just thought I'd bring that up.
  • Regionals Circuit Lab: Nothing big at all. Actually pretty well-run altogether. I just wanted to mention that there were quite a few extremely vague questions. In the end, though, it didn't turn out to actually be too awful.
  • State Machines: Way, way too easy. It only had a small handful of calculation questions, a small handful of definition questions, and the rest of the questions wound up being a lot of Machine Identification. Machine ID is extremely subjective for lots and lots of reasons, and I know my partner and I talked through a lot of technicalities of the examples they gave for the examples we needed to identify. Machines isn't an ID event, I enjoy the physics of it, not trying to debate whether or not something is technically a wedge, inclined plane, or lever. Again, I appreciate the contribution of the ES, and the effort they put into it. It wasn't copied, and the event actually got run, so again, I have gratitude for the ES. But for someone running machines in the future (if it ever gets run again... I have suspicions, but that's another story), try to avoid putting a ton of Simple Machine ID questions in there, because (a) mainly that they are subjective, and (b) the event has so many way cooler parts to it.
And that's all I can think of right now. After swim practice, I'll go ahead and put some of the cool event stories from this year I have in the Awesomely Run Event Stories forum. Hopefully these were useful, and again, no flame to the ES, these are just some learning points I came across this year.
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theskyistillred (December 20th, 2021, 7:46 am)
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Re: Poorly Run Event Stories

Post by bp31000 »

Our regional SO started on March 13th, and supposed to be completed with 20th and 27th, but due to hurricane affecting some parts of the state, competitions for 20th and 27th happened together on 27 th. then we waited, and waited and waited and waited till almost 2 weeks later, the results were announced for who is going to state. by that time, all the AP practice exams etc started for school, and life just became too hectic. felt like the whole year of studying for this was going to be a waste of time. then on the state, anatomy and physiology exam was 190+ very tough questions, It almost looked like examiner trying to show off his/her knowledge. of which we managed to get to answer about half in the allotted time. very disheartening, considering how much time we spend studying it.
then in dynamic planet (oceanography theme this year) questions were not about oceans!! tried to put a smile on the face and not swear for my partner's sake, and next day we got news that they used "wrong test" (this is the state SO!) and we will have a retest, which we took yesterday, same day as my two other AP practice exams :( but this time, questions were from the rules and designed so that people who studied would be able to answer!!! i am almost thinking that i dont want to complicate my life like this next year, and may be skip out on this altogether.
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Re: Poorly Run Event Stories

Post by thewaterymellen »

I'm not sure if this even counts because it's from Division A and not particularly horrible, but it did take place at regionals where Division B and C competed, so...

In 2018 at the Occidental College Regionals, In No Bones About It (why did they start ditching the cool creative names after Div A?), we had to go through a bunch of stations and identify bones or answer questions. At one of the stations, they had an arm. Apparently, the hand had fallen off at some point earlier in the day, so they replaced the hand with a messy, two-dimensional paper hand made out of a crumpled sheet of lined paper. Oh, and the arm fell on the floor because the table was too small, and no one had bothered to pick it up.

One of the questions at the station asked whether it was the left or right arm, and we couldn't tell because the hand was made out of paper by someone with no artistic ability. -_- After we finished all the stations, there was leftover time, so the proctor let us go back to whatever station we wanted or leave, so we went back to that one station, where the arm was now on the chair. (It was one of those desks where it's a tiny desk attached to a chair.) So we squatted, and like discreetly tried to uncrumple the paper hand despite not being allowed to touch it, and to this day, I have no idea if we got it right.

And also another Division A story (not my event, but my sister's) from two years earlier. In Starry Starry Night, they projected the questions onto a projector, and everyone had laser pointers. So, uh, people decided it would be a good idea to use the laser pointers to point to the correct answer on the screen because they weren't allowed to talk (for some reason? They did anyway.). I have no idea what happened after that, but I know it was a disaster.
Last edited by thewaterymellen on November 7th, 2021, 6:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Poorly Run Event Stories

Post by Jehosaphat »

I have a fun one from an invitational this year. In the trajectory event, at an unnamed tournament in Michigan, the trajectory set up was so unbelievably bad.

- They had no sand or cat litter, just some plastic boxes for the targets, so the supervisor would just eyeball where each ball landed. The targets were supposedly at 3m and 7m directly straight on, which is a problem to start, but then it was later discovered that the supervisor had only brought a 4m tape measure to measure distances, and had set up the targets at 3m and 6.6m instead, but didn't find out until halfway through the day.
- They allowed several illegal objects to be launched, from bouncy balls to foam baseballs.
- They did not impound most devices until AFTER launch, which resulted in some close calls with launching mechanisms almost impaling people (it ended up leaving a hole in the gym floor)
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Re: Poorly Run Event Stories

Post by pumptato-cat »

I have one from 2022 regionals :P
Mousetrap Vehicle:
The comp was virtual... They had two google meets, one for measuring and making sure devices complied w/ rules and the second for the actual tests.
We joined the first google meet early, and a couple of teams were in there already watching devices be measured. Now, for context, the rules for Div B. MTV only allowed the car to fit in a box of 40cm*60cm. This girl started measuring a ridiculously skinny vehicle. She announced, "24.73 INCHES!" (me and my partner found this hilarious--I still remember months later, the exact numbers) The proctor was like, oh ok yall are good, go to the next google meet. uh... 24.73in=62.81cm... (their vehicle was also missing the paperclip required to be attached to the front...)
That wasn't too bad, right? Well, we went to the next meet and watched someone measure their track before running. It was a WHOLE METER short. And they still approved it and let them compete. The look on my coach's face was absolutely priceless. Also, some people tried to get away w/ cutting a couple of cm off measurements. And they did! Gotta love virtual comps... :[
(note: I am thankful they ran builds in a virtual setting and we were allowed to compete. This is in no way an insult to that event supervisor and I hope it is not read that way-again, the purpose of this thread is to make sure future ESs do not repeat these mistakes)
Last edited by pumptato-cat on October 19th, 2022, 4:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Poorly Run Event Stories

Post by Greenlan000 »

I have a few portly run event stories and almost all of them are for bridges I will go from best to worst
1. At regionals we were doing a bridges test and the event supervisor said that the bucket was being held up by the sand loader so he made the jv team redo their test it was an understandable mistake but he preceded to have the bucket get stuck on every single other person bridge it all ended up okay but gave us a little heart attack.

2.I don’t remember the specifics but at state for fast facts the event supervisor made it so that instead of cycleing to a new sheet for fast facts every ten minutes or so she just gave everyone all three test with 50 minutes to do all three this made it so that some people left early because they had done every square they could do.

3. And finally for bridges at state last year I had worked for quite a while to get my bridge to be a contender for state so I was already extremely anxious going up to test. But my stress was relieved when our bridge had held all of the sand in the bucket thus giving us the 5000 gram bonus and giving us a chance to medal. But when they went to weight the sand it came out to 14800 grams our bridge hadn’t broken they had just ran out of sand because they had exactly 15000 grams in the sand dispenser. The event supervisor made us re do the test with a new timer. (A bit more context the JV team had tested before us and had broken our bridge when they were taking theirs out to test). We finished the loading a second time and right before the event supervisor took the bucket of the bridge my bridge patterned suggested they should hit the dispenser a bit to get the sand out and if he hadn’t said that we probably would have had to test again. But it came out with all 15000 with a major scare and got second at sate with a 3400 and got 2nd in bridges and 6th overall
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