Hardest Science Olympiad Event, in your opinion?

[ScienceOlympian]

What do you think is the hardest event, for Division B or C?
These are just opinions.
I believe it is Food Science.
:>

[geminicross]

Food Science is the easiest event to place in though (especially since you get a whole binder). I answered 1/3 of the questions at state, and still placed in the top half (9/24).
But it is a really annoying event IMHO.

[silverheart7]

Mission Possible, Sounds of Music, or Metric Mastery

[caseyotis]

Depends on what you mean by "hard".
Hardest to place in, most likely Metric Mastery, because you can be REALLY good and someone who's, like, an amateur can still beat you.
Water Quality is probably one of the easiest events.

[Skink]

It depends on how you define 'hardest' and who you are. I find build events harder than learning events personally, but that's not true for everyone. I wouldn't use that as a criterion for how 'hard' an event is.

In general, I think the more resources you get for an event, the harder the rules writers think it is. In other words, Keep the Heat and Thermo are harder than cheat sheet events. Additionally, the rule of thumb from preschool onwards is that more rules makes a game harder. Two page events are probably--on average--more demanding than one page events. This is an oversimplification, I realize.

For B, Mission and Sounds are very demanding. I discussed the former on the Mission topic. For the latter, even if teams have and can play instruments, their understanding of the physics of sound and waves tends to be lacking even among the best teams. In the realm of learning events, having deep understandings of stuff like Water Quality, Shock Value, and Crave the Wave takes an incredible amount of work. It's easier to medal in hard events, remember.

For C, Astronomy and Remote Sensing are insane in my opinion. Granted, I'm not an expert on either. It's possible they're not as bad as I think. Probably throw in Materials Science, too. That event looks evil.

Granted, it could easily be argued crapshoot events like WIDI or Picture This are the hardest due to the sheer unpredictability. And, uh, Pentathlon

[EastStroudsburg13]

Astronomy and Remote Sensing were my favorite two events, and of the two I'd say Astro was harder. There was just so much more you had to know and research and everything that it took the majority of my time. Remote took more general knowledge, so you needed a much wider base of knowledge, the knowledge itself wasn't as in-depth, so with practice you could get the hang of it. Also, you could frame your short answers in a way that got you partial credit a lot of times, while that is less common in Astro.

After looking at the rules, Materials Science looked pretty difficult since there's nothing like it in high school. Also, it's hard to study for the lab because it can be tough setting up the lab if you haven't done it before. Mission Possible is definitely difficult because it takes so much time to do. And I've heard lovely things about Geologic Mapping from our NY friends.

[winneratlife]

Granted, it could easily be argued crapshoot events like WIDI or Picture This are the hardest due to the sheer unpredictability. And, uh, Pentathlon

I wouldn't say that WIDI is exactly "unpredictable"; a good team is good. My team placed in top 3 with the same pairings all 4 times we did it; 2 1sts, a 2nd (one violation in writing), and a 3rd (one stupid left-right mixup)

Personally, I'd say the hardest to get done is Robot Arm, simply because there's so much tech involved and you have to fork out the money and spend the time and all that... personally that was the hardest of my events. Although I suppose a really hard Circuit Lab test could be considered harder; that's less of a "work hard and you'll get it" things and more of a "you have to work hard and be really smart at the same time" thing.

[pikachu4919]

Once someone told me Forensics is also one of the most challenging events ... but yes I agree with Astronomy and MatSci ... TPS also seems kinda hard ... Mission Possible seems really hard as well, and it's coming back next year for Division C ...

Of my good events in general, I'd probably say Forensics. Managing time wisely while trying to identify the evidence, determine the suspect and write the crime analysis is what makes it difficult in my opinion. However, I've gotten used to the competition so Forensics is actually one of MY best (and maybe even easiest) events. For a lot of the harder events, it just takes time, practice and experience to get good at them.

[isaysroar]

In my opinion... MISSION POSSIBLE! One mistake and your screwed. My team could have placed 1st at Regionals but one piece broke as they were impounding it and.... BANG! They scored at the lower 2/3.

[hmcginny]

For the most part, the difficulty of "crapshoot" events like WIDI and Fermi is falsified. While the results of both may seem somewhat unrelated to overall team score, the better teams tend to place very well in them, they're just also more likely to bomb them. Both just require a lot of logical thinking and after lot of practice you should never do too poorly. With WIDI at least, there are so few teams that know what they're doing at states and regionals that any team with a decent amount of practice should be able to place well.

Mission Possible was probably the most difficult event in terms of the potential for disaster on a given competition day. Sounds of Music is probably the most difficult in terms of raw number of hours needed to prepare well (when done right, each instrument is like its own separate building event and then theres the knowledge portion on top of it). In its old iteration, Technical Problem Solving could be incredibly variable, since you never knew exactly what to expect.

For some events, the material is difficult because it is never covered in any standard high school course (MatSci) but for others the fact that its entirely covered in high school classes (Chem Lab for example) make it just as difficult. Any school could place its two best chemistry students into Chem Lab and do very well.

I think in the end it has to be Sounds, it was a hellish building event (unlike some of the other events that have study portions) in terms of the time necessary, complexity of design if you intended to do well and just the overall difficulty of impressing the judges.