2014 National Tournament: University of Central Florida

[longtimelurker]

I would like to note that Science & Arts tied with Springhouse.

What is the tiebreaker rule for nationals? Based on medals, SAA has more, but Springhouse has the highest placing with 2nd in CJAP.

Most golds, if still tied then most silvers, if still tied most bronzes, etc.

Also, due to a scoring mixup, Science & Arts Water Quality was rescored from 32nd to 3rd(!).
Of course officially, the only scoring change is that Science & Arts gets duplicate 3rd place medals.

[TheGenius]

How do you even make a short Rocks test?

When writing the NY state Rocks test, we had a hard time paring it down from 180 questions and left it at 150 or so, we absolutely did not want to make it any shorter.

I don't know how many stations it was at Nationals, but with 10 teams per session, it had to be 10 at the minimum. With 10 stations, you can allow 4 minutes a station for a comfortable 40 minute time slot. With 4 minutes per station, you could easily give 7-10 minerals/rocks to identify plus 10-15 questions. To have a short test is just pathetic.

I wish I was the Rocks and Minerals/Fossils Nationals supervisor.

That was pretty much it: 10 stations, 5 minutes each. The stations themselves were extremely short. One of them was fill in the blank on Bowen's reaction series and nothing else. The test's entire answer sheet fit on one sheet of paper.

Geo Mapping was similar, with ~27 questions for 60 teams, and most of the questions being 4 choice multiple choice. I imagine there were quite a few ties.

[elephantower]

Did someone new make the earth science tests this year? Also, how the heck did they break ties in geomaps? I sorta doubt it was cross-section/profile/projection quality, as ours were only alright yet we got 2nd. Either they did something else, or people didn't do as well on the multiple choice as they thought. Any insights?

Edit: It can't have been time either, as we turned it in only once time was called (and another team turned it in halfway through)

[Le TARDIS]

I would like to note that Science & Arts tied with Springhouse.

What is the tiebreaker rule for nationals? Based on medals, SAA has more, but Springhouse has the highest placing with 2nd in CJAP.

Most golds, if still tied then most silvers, if still tied most bronzes, etc.

Also, due to a scoring mixup, Science & Arts Water Quality was rescored from 32nd to 3rd(!).
Of course officially, the only scoring change is that Science & Arts gets duplicate 3rd place medals.

Then why doesn't their overall placement get recognized? Science & Arts would have then place higher than Springhouse. No one wants to take anything away from anyone, but shouldn't the overall placements at least read higher officially? Science & Arts would actually be 14th (or around there), not 18th.

[Toms_42]

What is the tiebreaker rule for nationals? Based on medals, SAA has more, but Springhouse has the highest placing with 2nd in CJAP.

Most golds, if still tied then most silvers, if still tied most bronzes, etc.

Also, due to a scoring mixup, Science & Arts Water Quality was rescored from 32nd to 3rd(!).
Of course officially, the only scoring change is that Science & Arts gets duplicate 3rd place medals.

Then why doesn't their overall placement get recognized? Science & Arts would have then place higher than Springhouse. No one wants to take anything away from anyone, but shouldn't the overall placements at least read higher officially? Science & Arts would actually be 14th (or around there), not 18th.

I agree that they should update the charts. And yes, they would have barely beaten us and gotten 14.

[AJTheGreat1729]

I feel that the most unfortunate thing id that incidents such as this occur for too often and are swept under a rug, so to speak. Regardless of how well we did, I think that the scoring and placing of tests should be set to a higher standard.

That said, almost everyone running the National Tournament is a volunteer, and they all put an inordinate amount of effort into their tests. I do hope that no other teams ran into this sort of thing.

[fantasyfan]

I would like to note that Science & Arts tied with Springhouse.

What is the tiebreaker rule for nationals? Based on medals, SAA has more, but Springhouse has the highest placing with 2nd in CJAP.

Most golds, if still tied then most silvers, if still tied most bronzes, etc.

Also, due to a scoring mixup, Science & Arts Water Quality was rescored from 32nd to 3rd(!).
Of course officially, the only scoring change is that Science & Arts gets duplicate 3rd place medals.

How did they figure out that the SAA WQ kids got 3rd place, it isn't standard practice to go back and rescore everything?

[chalker]

I feel that the most unfortunate thing id that incidents such as this occur for too often and are swept under a rug, so to speak. Regardless of how well we did, I think that the scoring and placing of tests should be set to a higher standard.

That said, almost everyone running the National Tournament is a volunteer, and they all put an inordinate amount of effort into their tests. I do hope that no other teams ran into this sort of thing.

I'm not going to get into specifics, but do want to chime in on a couple things:

• We have a very clear policy posted on the national website: "At the end of the Science Olympiad National Awards Ceremony each team’s head coach will be provided one copy of the final scores. Places are tentative and may change if any scoring inconsistencies are brought to the attention of the arbitrators and verified within one hour after the ceremony is completed. If changes occur, the appropriate medals and trophies will be awarded. Teams will not be asked to return awards."
• Post tournament arbitrations that result in rank / medal changing are very rare. I could probably count on one hand the number of times it's happened in all the years I've been active at a national level. Many if not all of those have been discussed in the past here on SciOly.
• In the scoring spreadsheets I control, there are something like 4000 individual data points (e.g. raw scores, ties, tiers) that we have a little over 3 hours to collect and verify. Behind those raw scores are individual test questions, measurements, etc. For some events it's only 2 or 3 scored items, but for others it's 80-100. If we assume on average there are 40 items per team per event, that's ~160,000 scored items that need to be collected and tallied over the course of about 7 hours during the competition (note in the current situation this is where a single error occurred).
• In any human endeavour, mistakes occur. If you look at even the biggest efforts with virtually unlimited budgets, manpower and timeframes, errors still pop up (e.g. Apollo 13 accident, Sochi Olympics Opening Ceremony Rings, etc). We have policies and processes in place to try to catch and correct or minimize them, but occasionally something significant slips through the cracks, which is why we have an appeals / arbitration process to correct it after the fact.
• I personally got up at 6AM on Saturday and didn't get back to bed until 1AM Sunday. After the awards ceremony, as usual, we had a small handful of formal appeals regarding rankings. Instead of waiting a few days to look into them, because we know how important this is to everyone, we stayed up as long as needed and thoroughly investigated and responded to each one. This is a pretty typical timeline for me for a national tournament.
• There has been extensive interaction and discussions with the coaches currently involved, as well as the State director and National Office members. We are less than 48 hours later and those are still underway.

[AJTheGreat1729]

Thank you very much for your input, it has cleared up a lot for me.

[HeavyHitter406]

We were able to correct the mistake because we arbitrated. We talked immediately after we got the scores back to the guy who was running the whole thing, and he brought it to the head people. They went back through to see if any mistakes had been made in the grading and, sure enough, our score had a "2" next to it, making it look like a "32." We are speculating that, because we are now tied with the 3rd place team, we were tied before and they placed a "2" next to our "3" to signify that there were two thirds. Later, though, they looked at it and saw "32." Of course, that is just speculation, but the important thing is that the mistake was caught.