2019-2020 Cornell Invitational (B/C)

[topazand]

https://www.ezratech.us/competition/cor ... 20/results
Official Results

[Giantpants]

For the livestream, this link works: https://cornell.hosted.panopto.com/Pano ... 05013408b1

Tomorrow I guess I can write analyses on some events, but otherwise overall I thought Cornell was well run and good. Congrats to Rustin and to everyone who attended!

[Name]

Some thoughts on the comp:
Astro (2): I thought the test was pretty good with a good mix of easy and hard questions (like I've never seen the gravitational lensing formula before and had no idea how to do the LIGO optical question). The only real flaw I could see is the T/F questions mostly because they lacked variation (they all were on quasars) and each T/F was worth 2 points each- the same as some FRQs. There was also a general lack of math based questions on the test. But otherwise astro was well ran. 8/10
Code (9): I'm extremely disappointed in how we did due to us choking the timed question. We thought that the first word was earth, giving us "earth is red, and earth is blue" After that evidently didn't work we stuck with the assumption earth was correct, leading us to get no time bonus. But overall the event was ran fine and the test was good. I have a couple of questions on it (I thought I did the RSA correct but I lost full credit on it (kinda wish they stuck to toebes style rsa but whatever), and also the morbit/pollux where both our teams got either "get girmer" which was 5 errors and "get firmer" which was 4 errors) But assuming we just screwed it up and it was not a problem with the test itself, 9/10
Fermi (1): Yay I got to do fermi one more time! The test was generally on the easier side (we had a decently high points/question ratio considering I haven't practiced fermi since march) but the fact it was 57 questions balanced it out and probably seperated teams. Skimming through I noticed they did probability when they stated percentage (this benefitted us because we also did probability lol) but there were no other key errors I noticed. Considering this was a trial, it was very well ran. 8/10
Fossils (16): I'm new to fossils and lol the test made me realize how little I knew and how much more work I need to put into fossils. Honestly i'm probably too inexperienced in fossils to give the test itself a fair judgement but there was nothing wrong with how it was ran so I guess its a 10/10?

Overall: The tests itself were a improvement over the tests Cornell has had in the past (at least in my events). The opening ceremony was fun- free ice cream and picture this!!!! and the kahoot before awards was also great. They got awards running on time and the awards went mostly smoothly (except the slides didn't present properly). The split of div B and C caused the date for div C to be really early, but also lead to the tourney being much better IMO. 9.5/10

Congrats to Bayard for winning and also kellenberg third

[sophisSyo]

Some thoughts on Cornell:

First of all, thank you so much to everyone who ran this competition! It has, imo, improved so much over the past couple of years and it was already pretty well organized.
Designer Genes (3): Oh boy. I'd heard it would be very difficult, but I was not prepared for those 33 pages....pretty much the only thing I read off the blackboard in the front lol. All in all, I think it was quite a good test, and like last year, will give me material that I'll need to review/return to. I really liked the diversity - from basics genetics to some biotech to more complicated questions with operons, fluorescence (sigh), and CRISPR Cas. I'm pretty curious to see the answer key, though, but I just might have been too tired by last session - I knew what the answer to that pedigree question was supposed to be, but I saw contradictions in the pedigree. I don't know. Cornellians should know better than me lol. It was quite refreshing to see a diverse and difficult test, though, because I remember that a lot of competitions last year just threw general genetics at us with maybe a handful of CRISPR Cas questions....and were mostly MC. Thank you for the tears! 10/10
Green Generation (6): I love this trial - gave me throwbacks to Ecology. The test was maybe a bit too short, but I wasn't really going to complain about that in this case lol. Like Designer Genes, it was diverse - covering biomes to general earth science to environmental laws (rip @Stockholm Convention) 9.5/10
Ornithology (4): Pretty awesome to hear Gracie the bald eagle and have a test made by an actual raptor expert lol. I liked that there were sounds on the test and yessss, dense stations (mostly 8ish for 2.5 minutes - a perfect time span for reasonable pressure on the testtakers), but the only thing was....some answers were in your questions (if I remember correctly, with the wild turkey and Wilson's snipe), and ID could have been harder (female Passeriformes would have been a complete RIP). Test was run very smoothly though, and thank you for playing the sounds multiple times on your speakers. Also, very pretty powerpoint!! 8.5/10
WIDI (f in the chat pls): Well I was definitely relieved that it was nothing like last year's (those mini marshmallows wrecked me) and objectively speaking, I think the WIDI was pretty fair. I guess if you wanted you could have made it more difficult with something requiring more dexterity, but this was definitely an improvement, hitting all the usuals....different colors, directional differentiations, different objects, tying and stabbing stuff on skewers....(Also...we never got our rubric back? So I can't speak for that.) 9.5/10
Like my teammate said above me (wassup), it was overall very well run, especially the opening and award ceremonies lol. A Kahoot with several hundred people is a.sight...and everyone is a sucker for a Kahoot. All the proctors were super nice, trying to make sure all the kids were here before starting, ensuring that directions and time left were clear, and quickly ensuring all our references were bueno. My only comment would be the miscommunication about Tillium. Some kids came to homeroom ten minutes into lunch break because they had an event before, and then we all went to Tillium, and by then they had to go to their next event. Some of those kids had events for two more sessions and couldn't eat until the end of the day.
But again, thank you so much! This was definitely one of the best invitationals we've ever attended, and I think all the kids enjoyed it very much. A congratulations to all the teams!

[waterlubber]

My thoughts on various events, ordered alphabetically.

Chem Lab: Honestly, I expected a titration. We ended up showing up a few minutes late and missing out on the volumetric pipettes, doing with with the grad cylinders we brought instead. Still ended up with a very decent result. The test was very unconventional. It seemed to me like almost all of the questions could only be answered with esoteric knowledge or experience in the field. We (Kellenberg) ended up doing alright because I knew quite a decent amount of the questions from watching the likes of CodysLab, NileRed, etc. on Youtube when I was bored.

Circuit Lab: The test itself was pretty standard fare, I didn't feel like it had anything out of the ordinary on it. Notably, the lab was capacitor based, rather than resistor based - quite refreshing, considering how many "find the unknown resistor" labs I've been seeing recently. The hardest part of the capacitor lab was just trying to sort out the wiring spaghetti.

Code Busters: The people who wrote this test put quite a few memes in there. One of my teammates was working on the bonus (she can typically solve aristocrats in just a handful of minutes -- I tend to stick with the math) and similarly made the "earth" mistake. I noticed the question mentioning Benjamin Franklin and realized it was the "Early to bed..." quote. Ironically, the supervisor originally did not take our answer, and said it was wrong, but later corrected it (perhaps a typo in the answer key?)
The Pollux cipher had another typo in it. There was no plaintext space character (symbolized by two "space" pollux things), so I struggled to find the solution. As it turns out, I'm a bigger clown than the circus: the answer was "GETGNOMED"
I thought I got the RSA correct as well, but they did not give any credit. Not really a fan of the "encrypt letters" bit -- RSA is a numerical encryption system, and you can encode letters in any number of ways, ranging from ASCII to baudot. Not to mention doing it one letter at a time just makes it a glorified Caesar cipher. (still better than using 2 pages of 8.5x11" for the extended euclidean)
The Pokèmon theme song also made a cameo appearance, and apparently the Walmart slogan. We did not get the Xenocrypt, and neither did B (with native speakers).



Detector Building: This event, like the others, was run at a state level, and I noticed quite a few alarming or odd things. The test was very short and easy, with a lot of it being graphs and high school algebra and not much of it being theory behind thermistors, etc. I wasn't asked much about my device, but I had already explained a few aspects when going over documentation so YMMV. Notably, every other team I saw there was using a breadboarded detector, something that I found extremely surprising considering how unreliable breadboards are. Most alarmingly, however, the event confirmed my suspicious for what is almost certain to happen at States: the deciding factor in which teams will win is most likely going to be the accuracy of the ES's equipment. They were reading temperatures from -1 to 1 C in ice baths that I read at 0.05C (which is most likely the correct temperature.) Finding a thermometer to calibrate my own detector against has been difficult, as I can't find any that are accurate enough for good calibration. I feel that States will be very, very contentious, as having your team placement in what is a comparatively "easy" event (compared to other electronics events like Robot Arm) determined by RNG is not fun.

Sounds of Music: Aside from some relatively minor (ha) tuning issues caused by what I think was cold weather, our device worked fine. However, the test...did not. The test was clearly written by a band player, and with myself and my teammate being string and choral performers, respectively, we could not answer the majority of the questions. I was able to figure out a surprisingly large amount by just throwing amateur radio physics at them (including an electrical explanation of impedence hastily modified to fit air/fluids). We answered "boomwhacker" for about half of the piano identifications and left the rest blank. Overall, probably the weirdest test I've seen.
I'd love to know if anyone knew what was in the circles. (This applies: https://preview.redd.it/ieeyi5rfv3331.jpg)
One of the questions mentioned G7 resolving to C, and I answered in a similar manner. The grader's response was "not sure if BS, but correct." I got a chuckle out of that, which almost made up for the severe emotional trauma that GETGNOMED caused for me.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to attend Fermi -- which happened to be the first event I ever medalled in at Cornell 3 years ago.

[Diactaeon]

I'd love to know if anyone knew what was in the circles. (This applies: https://preview.redd.it/ieeyi5rfv3331.jpg)

The stuff inside the circles are baffles, which are a part of single reed mouthpieces

[Name]

Code Busters: The people who wrote this test put quite a few memes in there. One of my teammates was working on the bonus (she can typically solve aristocrats in just a handful of minutes -- I tend to stick with the math) and similarly made the "earth" mistake. I noticed the question mentioning Benjamin Franklin and realized it was the "Early to bed..." quote. Ironically, the supervisor originally did not take our answer, and said it was wrong, but later corrected it (perhaps a typo in the answer key?)
The Pollux cipher had another typo in it. There was no plaintext space character (symbolized by two "space" pollux things), so I struggled to find the solution. As it turns out, I'm a bigger clown than the circus: the answer was "GETGNOMED"
I thought I got the RSA correct as well, but they did not give any credit. Not really a fan of the "encrypt letters" bit -- RSA is a numerical encryption system, and you can encode letters in any number of ways, ranging from ASCII to baudot. Not to mention doing it one letter at a time just makes it a glorified Caesar cipher. (still better than using 2 pages of 8.5x11" for the extended euclidean)
The Pokèmon theme song also made a cameo appearance, and apparently the Walmart slogan. We did not get the Xenocrypt, and neither did B (with native speakers).

This is literally exactly what happened to us... "GETGNOMED" wtf. My partner couldn't get the xeno and we also had a native spanish speaker on B who couldn't get it. One of the patristos was also problematic and we couldn't get anywhere. Our B team had a first time filler who happened to recognize the quote and get the solve under 3 min. We stuck all 3 of us on the timed for all of the first 10 min, so the failure of solving the timed question probably costed us another couple of questions in addition, although we did manage to solve the timed after one of us went back to it. Also I realized looking back we ended up skipping the last question... which turned out to be an unspecified atbash lol.
I don't mind the presence of memes, but the memes they had could've been implemented a bit better.

[waterlubber]

<snip>

This is literally exactly what happened to us... "GETGNOMED" wtf. My partner couldn't get the xeno and we also had a native spanish speaker on B who couldn't get it. One of the patristos was also problematic and we couldn't get anywhere. Our B team had a first time filler who happened to recognize the quote and get the solve under 3 min. We stuck all 3 of us on the timed for all of the first 10 min, so the failure of solving the timed question probably costed us another couple of questions in addition, although we did manage to solve the timed after one of us went back to it. Also I realized looking back we ended up skipping the last question... which turned out to be an unspecified atbash lol.
I don't mind the presence of memes, but the memes they had could've been implemented a bit better.

I believe the "GETGNOMED" was a reference to the most cursed channel on YT (https://youtu.be/6n3pFFPSlW4), but I agree that the implementation was subpar at best.

I would have liked to see the actual accepted answers — if they were wrong with the bomus it's not out of the question that they did RSA, etc. wrong. (problem with RSA is that the test did not tell you how to encode text as numbers, meaning there were several potential correct answers)

I think losing the RSA hurt us a lot as that counts for a lot of points and we tend to focus on the high value ciphers rather than just low value aristos.

Speaking of high value questions, anyone get the patrisrocrat that had "who" repeating? Seemed like it might have been from a song.

Apologies for the typos, I don't have a mechanical keyboard on my phone and don't want to get out of bed

[Giantpants]

Alright so

Astronomy (10th) - I was definitely hoping to have done better on this one, but I can also certainly commend the quality of the test. Lots of different sections, some of which were harder than others, but nothing was too too impossible. I was a little surprised on the lack of math, but the heavy free response questions showed us what we need to work on and how much we still have to learn. A great test in my opinion! I’ll give it a clean 9/10.

Dynamic Planet (8th) - Same idea, was hoping to have done a bit better, but I attribute that to us not faring too well on the somewhat specific multiple choice section, bringing us down on a test that probably had close scores due to it being pretty easy. The written section was quite easy, so we lost basically no points there. Again, hope to learn a few things from this, but the difficulty difference between the sections seemed a bit weird. It was good though, and the people running it were very very nice! 8/10 from me.

Geologic Mapping (3rd) - I found this test challenging. It was long, in-depth, and detailed. Twas nice to see some isostasy math return from old dynamic planet topics, and, once again, it showed a bunch of areas we need to work on. Lots of different types of questions, so it was a broad and solid, yet challenging and fair test. Plus I got some funny comments on my answer sheet!! Overall, 10/10.

Sounds of Music (2nd) - Sigh. Was not a huge fan of this one. The test was like all over the place, and not even accounting for my partner's and my musical inclinations, I just feel like it didn't ask a very broad range of questions. Also, there were very little calculations or things of that sort. Also, this isn't really related, but we were taking the test (which was a LOT of pages) on super tiny desks, so I ended up just putting the binder on the floor and leaning over and flipping through the pages there, which was very uncomfortable lol. Also, the way we had to mark down answers was strange, flipping back and forth from written to scantron to written again, so idek. I don't blame anyone for the logistical issues, that just seems to be a bit of bad luck. The instrument testing was normal and without particular incident, and the proctors were quite nice. The test itself just seemed to be a bit off. Regardless, I'll give it a 7/10.

Overall, I liked Cornell a lot more than the past three years. I think the split between B and C was a good idea, and it allowed for more focus and attention to detail! I was a bit confused as to why the awards were starting so late, but I didn't particularly mind since we were staying another night anyway lol. Our team had a great time opening our season there, and we were super happy with our end result, including our epic Spirit Award!! Also the kahoot was fun albeit pretty random lol. ShiningAlpaca is a legend forever. Thanks to Cornell for running a great season starter!

Congrats to Bayard for winning and also kellenberg third

Thank you! Congrats to you and your whole team on an epic placement!

[whythescratchyface]

Geologic Mapping (3rd) - I found this test challenging. It was long, in-depth, and detailed. Twas nice to see some isostasy math return from old dynamic planet topics, and, once again, it showed a bunch of areas we need to work on. Lots of different types of questions, so it was a broad and solid, yet challenging and fair test. Plus I got some funny comments on my answer sheet!! Overall, 10/10.

glad you enjoyed geomapping! i agree, the test was pretty hard, and this was reflected in the exam scores. i'm happy to see that someone appreciates the isostasy section of the test - it was specifically designed so that you could figure it out based on concepts you already knew and reason between two models given rather than just copypasting definitions from your binder haha