Poorly Run Event Stories

[ktscioly23]

Yikes...

[Panda Weasley]

So Exp Des regionals this year was not in stations for once, but the prompt we were given made no sense. We were told to do "something to do with sample accuracy", but written in a much more confusing way. We were given a styrofoam plate, 208 red beads, and 75 white beads. So.Confusing.

[ScienceOlympian]

The Meteorology tests in Regionals for the past 2 years have been SUPER easy.
The tests had literally a paragraph before each question STATING THE ANSWER.

If a question was about calculating how far a thunderstorm was, THE PARAGRAPH BEFORE IT GAVE THE FORMULA.

I can't believe we got 2nd. I would think the majority of the people got 90% of it right.

[Unome]

...
CompMach- Reused the B DIVISION SIMPLE MACHINES TEST from state last year. It was so easy that my brother finished in 5 minutes, and I checked it over in 1. For the lever testing, the loops on the weights were way too small, and we took twice as long to finish than normal. (And for a tidbit of entertainment, which of the following is not a simple machine? A) inclined plane B) screw C) car. Obviously I changed the answer choices to avoid getting penalized, but it was just as ridiculous.)
...

Ugh, I remember that test; me and my partner finished it in five minutes, triple-checked it, then bombed the lever section (I think we flipped the masses), so we got third.

[annaphase]

Well we had a protein modeling test where we were not provided with the rulers, so we had no way of putting the scale on the mini toobers we were given to fold the protein with, and that was a disaster. Also, the computers were online, so anyone could have just searched up the answers. The proctor was also ignoring everything going on in the room and reading a book while we were building the models. That was great.
There was also an anatomy and physiology test I took one year where there were questions like
#)Question?
a) wrong answer
b) correct answer
c) correct answer
d) only c
and, even better,
#) Question?
a) wrong answer
b) correct answer
c) wrong answer
d) only b

And when we asked the proctor how we were meant to approach these questions (because the first one didn't have a single answer, and the second one had two, because, I assume someone typoed "both a and b" or "both a and c", etc.) they told us they didn't write the test and were just going to score it based off the answer key and we had to put down "the most correct answer" which was really not helpful when they were identical

[zyzzyva980]

Reused the B DIVISION SIMPLE MACHINES TEST

Maybe someone has already mentioned this, but this story reminds me of something that has happened to me at least once, and maybe more, when I was a competitor.

I took tests that I had written.

It wasn't the exact same test, but I recognized questions verbatim that I had written for online practice tests. This happened an awful lot in Remote Sensing, an event where most proctors didn't really know much about the topic. I wrote a handful of Remote Sensing practice tests for the test exchange, and I'd often stumble across those questions in competition.

Future proctors: If you don't know much about a subject, don't just copy tests from the test exchange. Not a good idea.

[samlan16]

UPDATE: Chem Lab- My school brought 2 teams to regionals, but only A team competed in Chem Lab. Upon receiving the score sheet, we were surprised to learn that we did not show up and got a score of 17 for the team. Upon further scrutiny, B team happened to earn 7th place in the event- in ghost form! We challenged it and found out that the proctor had accidentally entered our ranking on the wrong team.

Whoops.

[Skink]

UPDATE: Chem Lab- My school brought 2 teams to regionals, but only A team competed in Chem Lab. Upon receiving the score sheet, we were surprised to learn that we did not show up and got a score of 17 for the team. Upon further scrutiny, B team happened to earn 7th place in the event- in ghost form! We challenged it and found out that the proctor had accidentally entered our ranking on the wrong team.

Whoops.

This definitely happens (and probably more than we'd like). I just had a personal scenario similar to this a few weeks ago at a Regional where scoring didn't do any counseling but, instead, just took the score report form that I had filled out and ran. They...misinterpreted my handwriting (written admittedly in a pinch since I was the penultimate event submitted) meaning they flipped second (medaling) and sixth (at this tournament, non-medaling) places despite team numbers. Here's the worst part: I was handing out second place medals and was like 'Huh? This isn't right...' when this particular team was announced and came up, but I couldn't deny them their medals right there on the floor. I had to try and clean it up afterwards. It was two teams from the same school, and I guess the scoring folks thought my 'B' looked like my 'E', which were the different team names (think 'Skink B' and 'Skink E'). I admitted to poor penmanship (which the tournament director got a kick out of), and they admitted to the mistake. I just felt really bad for the second placers whom won but, well, really didn't.

[zyzzyva980]

That happened to me at an invite earlier this year. I ran Air Trajectory, and they gave us abbreviations to use for each school. I don't remember exactly, but I think one was CHS and one was CCHS. We definitely put down the right abbrevations-- we double-checked. But at awards they announced it wrong. I texted my co-supervisor (another user on the site! I'll give you three guesses) "Hey, did they get that right?" After awards I went home and checked, and, yeah, they got it wrong. So 1st place was accidentally awarded to like the 8th place team, and vice versa. Fortunately it was just an invitational.

[bernard]

That happened to me at an invite earlier this year. I ran Air Trajectory, and they gave us abbreviations to use for each school. I don't remember exactly, but I think one was CHS and one was CCHS. We definitely put down the right abbrevations-- we double-checked. But at awards they announced it wrong. I texted my co-supervisor (another user on the site! I'll give you three guesses) "Hey, did they get that right?" After awards I went home and checked, and, yeah, they got it wrong. So 1st place was accidentally awarded to like the 8th place team, and vice versa. Fortunately it was just an invitational.

I made our tournament scoresheet from scratch for our invitational and a similar thing happened for Scrambler since I didn't include a way of recording failed runs so the second place team actually deserved first. But overall it was not bad since that was the only error in the 8 different types of scoresheets I coded.