Thanks, Alanchalker wrote:Keep the Heat and Thermodynamics are rotating out next year. We keep events in typically for 2 years in the Physics track. It'll be quite a while before they come back in.istou wrote: The problem is changing the rules year to year, like measuring the temperature in the kettle or right after pouring water in the beaker (the difference is on average ~15C!). Our team spent 100+ hours calibrating the thermos they built. Last year in both county and South Cal, they got both predictions within 0.2 C. This year at LA county - 5 degrees off. Impossible! Now, we know why. The event supervisors (really nice and friendly guys, by the way) changed the initial temperature measurement method, which caused on average 5-6 C error at about 30 minutes point for about 100 ml volume.
Anyway, let's hope the event will continue forever!
Best luck
Also, no matter how detailed we make the rules, there will always be event supervisors who interpret them slightly differently or deliberately change their local implementation either due to logistical reasons or because they don't pay attention to all the details. There isn't much we can do from a national level about that.
Despite those small changes, our team did very well again in Thermo.
One event where the rules were really bent at South California was Technical problem solving. The rule 4 about scoring 80% for the lab and 20% for test question was violated - the event supervisor from Caltech decided to score the opposite, 20% for the Lab and 80% for the test, citing that he was not able to prepare proper lab for bio part. We filed the complain, but did not get any response from the arbitration.
Best luck in the future. We do enjoy the SO!
