Brown Invitational

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dmantovani
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Brown Invitational

Post by dmantovani »

The Brown Invitational has finished the results can be seen in the link below.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing
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MadCow2357
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Re: Brown Invitational

Post by MadCow2357 »

dmantovani wrote: February 8th, 2020, 5:48 pm The Brown Invitational has finished the results can be seen in the link below.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing
Ayyy look who finally joined the forums :lol:

Nice job in boomi!
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Barrington HS '23
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Re: Brown Invitational

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Congrats to acton for taking first and second!

Events were ran to varying degrees of success. Some had serious issues (forensics was thrown out) while others went smoothly. Overall still a fun competition.

Maybe I'll post reviews later.

I'll just edit in reviews lol

So literally all my partners couldn't come and I ended up working with new people i've never worked with for every event.

Astro (2): Honestly the test was kinda wacky, and I had trouble understanding what one section even wanted from me (and basically got the whole thing wrong lol). Otherwise ok, tested a bunch of different subjects and whatever. Math was a bit easy. The grading is sorta sus for a couple of questions, but overall decently ran. (9/10)

Code (1): Our timed solve wasn't that amazing to begin with without my usual partners here carrying, but I ended up calling time with 3 errors and the procter spent forever checking before saying no, so the 2:14 solve could've been much faster. The only reason we prob won was bc the same issue as last year- the test was 8q long (including time after they threw out the only pollux) and didnt test patristos or xenos, allowing us to finish and full score the test. I will say though the aristo with error was very well written and challenging. Any good code test should be at least like double this length. (6.5/10)

Fossils (3): The stations were set up a bit confusing but mostly bc I didnt pay attention. Test had decent questions but the main issue was the complete lack of real specimen used. I also wished they didn't take off full credit for spelling (or even credit at all if it was reasonably close) and that ended up really hurting us. Only 2 min per station was quite challenging and prob fit the stations well. One interesting thing, (not necessarily good or bad) is not really focusing on inverts, and a bit more on verts then usual (8/10, would be 9.5 with actual specimen)

Overall: The quality of events can still be worked on, but overall still a fun competition (8.5/10)
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Re: Brown Invitational

Post by sophisSyo »

Brown was fun although I wish we got to run around campus more (outside of events cuz I did plenty of running there aha)! Congrats to all the teams! I'm tired and don't feel like doing much so Imma do some reviews.
Designer Genes (5): Okay so I sadly did not take last year's test the night before as I planned to (screw you JMol)..."sadly" because it was pretty much the same exact test. And I think this is part of the reason that I'm guessing the point margins between the teams was very small (We only got two questions fully wrong, and partial on 2 or 3 others). So, really any team who had practiced last year's tests ahead of time or attended Brown last year had a significant challenge. The point margins were that small even though I didn't remember last year's test very well and my partner hadn't taken it, though. I do wish that the test was longer and more difficult? Like this test format was very much a 2019 style test, because most of the people who've been to last year's invites and this year's agree with me that DG has gotten far more difficult with a greater emphasis on biotechnology this year. The test did have some very nice questions, like having to think about that question with ssDNA etc., but I would have appreciated a longer, more difficult and intensive exam (operon charts etc). 7/10
Disease Detectives (3): Kind of similar problems - I thought the test was quite short, although point margins were definitely bigger than the ones for Designer Genes. The best DD exams are those that leave me scrambling for time imo, and we pretty much finished the exam in 15 minutes. There was only one math part, the usual vocab, and some other questions. I liked the actual tiebreaker, but why make the second tiebreaker "all these questions can be answered in two sentences or less. The team with the most concise and accurate answers will be given the tiebreaker"? I feel like it would have been easier for the graders to just make another tiebreaker? Anyway, the tiebreaker question was pretty USABO style to me but they really could have tested so much more with this test. 6.5/10
Ornithology (3): Okay well we thought we failed but that's another story. I thought some of the questions were weirdly weighted (a bit more than necessary), but the questions were good, and it will be great to study from. I was a bit flustered because the formatting on the sheet was a bit off and we had auditorium style seats and I couldn't really write on the test at the same time as my partner (how we usually do), but I did really like that there were a bunch of sounds. You can usually get away with not knowing sounds at invites and regionals and still do very well, but they really whacked us with that haha. I felt that some things were a tad unnecessary (a bunch of questions on subspecies instead of something more difficult, asking us to shade in the range on a map that looked like the allaboutbirds map instead of just asking us about range normally, asking which bird decreased 50% out of a lineup of birds), but it was fair game. Some stations had more questions than others, but overall good questions - thank you for actually testing eggs/nests. The ID slide was nice for inducing panic;) 8.5/10
Protein Modeling (2): Sigh. Again, sad that I didn't look at last year's test because maybe 92% of the test was the exact same as last year's test. I saw that they tried somewhat to scramble it up, like when asking about three amino acids they switched up the order in the question, but I pulled out last year's test and this year's test and even some of the question numbers were the exact same. Regarding JMol, I liked the section because I've seen that not all competitions even really have a separate section for it. I thought it was rather short (I feel the same way about this section for a lot of competitions), because I finished in maybe ten minutes and then helped with the written test. But good questions, could have been harder, but that's not really necessary. My only suggestion for the JMol exploration is that event supervisors clear the JMol apps after each time block because we walked in and a lot of the computers still had the protein displayed, and some didn't, which did not really seem fair to me. So repeated questions are my only main comment. 8.8/10
WIDI (no): I did far better in last year's WIDI which I liked because it had more parts, but my first comment is that my placement is lower than the points I lost on the rubric, but the event supervisors did not appear to collect my time as a tiebreaker, so idk how that works. Otherwise though, smoothly run as usual, WIDI could have been harder because the point margins were definitely very small. 8.5/10

Thank you so much to everyone involved in running this tournament! It is always very fun to visit Providence and participate, and I'm sad that this was my last time attending. Thank you for being so responsive to competitors and rip the broken trophy lol
Past Events: A&P, DD, DG, Exp, Herpe, IS, Orni, PM, WIDI etc.
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