2020 Yale Invitational

[builderguy135]

What happened with PPP?

The event was held in a theatere/lecture hall. There was a team that shot their rocket (an empty soda bottle) at 30 psi towards the celing. They broke the light. And it's so sad because who knows how old those lights are and how they could fix them.

yikes....

[bromothymol]

anatomy (5): this event was run well, stations were easy to navigate (albeit kind of on the long end so it became more of a speed test), good distribution of topics and difficulty, overall very smoothly run.

designer (1): I thought this was a good, fun test of problem-solving ability and understanding of how to apply concepts. however, I saw some teams around me who really had no idea how to do a lot of the questions and just left early. the level of the test may have been better suited to an invitational like MIT where there are more national and fewer local teams in attendance imo.

because there were a lot of team members who didn't go to Yale, I did some events that I don't really do regularly: chem lab (6), water (2), protein (3), disease (8). yale never runs a lab portion for chem lab, which I found kinda weird. the distribution of topics for water quality was not very balanced (no ID, not much ecology) and very interpretation heavy. from what I could tell, protein test was a bit on the easier side so I just relied on protein chemistry I knew from general bio experience. didn't do the jmol part so can't speak to that.

agree with the previous poster about how rushed the announcing of medalists was since we were also sitting in the balcony. our homeroom was also a little bit cramped for holding everyone on our team (we didn't even have 30 people this time) compared to recent years, which was kind of a bummer. it was also inconvenient that for some events, the ES would wait for every team to show up, which meant that we would get started 5-10 minutes after the block started, which basically got everyone behind schedule. this mainly sucked because after the 3rd block event we were released like 10 minutes into the "lunch" period, and since there's no 15-minute gap between lunch and the other blocks, by the time we got out it was basically time for 4th block anyway. many of our team members didn't really see the point of a lunch period either.

sorry for all of the complaints but those were the main problems (along with the build stuff) that our team noted during the competition. YUSO is one of the farther invites that South attends, so we as a team are really glad that test quality has improved by a lot since 2-3 years ago.

[vehicleguy]

Gravity (4)- The venue wasn't the best and the track was not set up perfectly. I'm not going to complain though because I'm pretty sure the people running gravity learned they were doing it the Wednesday before.

Ornithology (1)- The test was well written and difficult. Unfortunately there were some issues with sounds, but other than that, everything ran smoothly.

RIP ppp and ws

[pb5754]

astro (1): ashernoel wrote the test so i already knew it would be exceedingly hard, so the test was pretty much what i expected. question 5 on this test and question 5 on the solvi test were the exact same, but that seems to have been an accident.

chem lab (6): i don't actually do chem lab so can't say much about this. as far as i could tell test difficulty etc. seemed fine. probably would have medalled if my partner knew how molar mass worked smh but oh well.

fossils (3): soloed this event. seemed like a pretty good length/difficulty for an invite of this level of competitiveness. there were a couple of specimens that i was surprised that i ided wrong but im probably just bad.

geo mapping (1): pretty good test ig but the math questions seemed worded weirdly.

[bromothymol]

probably would have medalled if my partner knew how molar mass worked smh but oh well.

WHY ARE YOU SO SHADY

[janinetu]

Thank you so much for all your feedback, and please keep the reviews coming! Your constructive criticism is extremely helpful & appreciated, and will definitely be taken into consideration in planning next year's tournament I'm also really glad you enjoyed the tests since one of our biggest priorities this year was improving test quality.

I just want to say that I'm so so sorry about the builds, especially wright stuff and ppp - all of Yale's gyms were completely booked due to a national badminton tournament, which left us with essentially no options. Next year we're going to try to plan our date around the badminton competition.

About forensics and chem lab never having a lab portion at YUSO, this is unfortunately entirely due to Yale admin. Yale has extremely stringent rules regarding minors in labs, and we have tried many times in the past to explain why there are no risks, to no avail. We are going to try again next year for sure, but yeah I know that this is a huge downside to coming to YUSO. In addition, most of Yale's labs are really far from central campus, but that is a more minor issue if we get administration to allow us to run labs (which we really hope we can accomplish for next year!).

Again, thank you so much for coming and keep the feedback coming!!!

[pb5754]

probably would have medalled if my partner knew how molar mass worked smh but oh well.

WHY ARE YOU SO SHADY

lol oops

[Kenny5056]

Sounds of Music (7) - Overall great test and well-organized. Only criticism about the test was that it was very physics-heavy. My partner usually does music theory while I do the physics problems. We were called up to test our instrument first, and when I came back I had about 40 minutes to complete all the physics MC and free response, which was too little time. Additionally, the free response about the bulk modulus was innovative but kind of awkward to put on a music test. If the test included more concepts relating to music (e.g. pitch, loudness, timbre) instead of just the physics behind how sound is produced, I think it would have been fairer.

Fossils (11) - This test was all-encompassing, and it was one of the best fossils tests I have ever taken. It really did test ALL knowledge we had to know, including vocab terms and famous palaeontologists.

Astronomy (19) - Don't @ me on this... my partner and I had to put ourselves on it last-minute. We got 15 out of 150+ points, and we still beat half the teams... the test was obviously way too hard (and long) for the majority of competitors. Some vocab terms (including long German astronomy words) that I guarantee no competitor had ever seen in their life were on the exam. There were only 2 MC on the whole test, and all the rest were free response that were worth about 2 pts each.

All criticisms aside, overall this year's competition was the best yet. I found the awards ceremony location to be awkward and too tight; a bigger auditorium with a stage would have been nice. But apart from that, I couldn't have asked for anything more. Thank you for hosting all of us!!

[jackway]

About forensics and chem lab never having a lab portion at YUSO, this is unfortunately entirely due to Yale admin. Yale has extremely stringent rules regarding minors in labs, and we have tried many times in the past to explain why there are no risks, to no avail. We are going to try again next year for sure, but yeah I know that this is a huge downside to coming to YUSO. In addition, most of Yale's labs are really far from central campus, but that is a more minor issue if we get administration to allow us to run labs (which we really hope we can accomplish for next year!).

I think you can talk to Joe about that...

[MadCow2357]

About forensics and chem lab never having a lab portion at YUSO, this is unfortunately entirely due to Yale admin. Yale has extremely stringent rules regarding minors in labs, and we have tried many times in the past to explain why there are no risks, to no avail. We are going to try again next year for sure, but yeah I know that this is a huge downside to coming to YUSO. In addition, most of Yale's labs are really far from central campus, but that is a more minor issue if we get administration to allow us to run labs (which we really hope we can accomplish for next year!).

I think you can talk to Joe about that...

Who's Joe?