National Test Discussion

[Adi1008]

Astronomy (1): Actually legendary in terms of how much fun it was to take . As usual, Donna and Tad made a super awesome test that was a good length (we finished with like 3 seconds left heh and were working furiously the entire time) and also pretty hard (still not sure about a couple questions, even after looking them up after the event ). I thought the first part, over DSOs and IDing, was a bit too easy, but the second part was awesome and I honestly wish the entire test was just a ton of questions like that. I especially liked the questions where it gave you a color-color diagram and SEDs of different YSOs and asked you to figure out stuff about them and the question about the brown dwarf and their atmospheres (reminded me of solar system and the phase diagram which was super fun). All in all, this test was pretty much the ideal nationals test and I hope next year they make it even harder and longer than before with even more stimulus/concept questions (like the back half) and super hard DSO questions

Overall A+ (make it even harder and longer though )

WIDI (4): oh god this literally gave me a heart attack when I saw the materials :/ From a builder's perspective, this was actually a nightmare, with complex plane designations and tiny materials that I could barely hold (the pins and the super tiny ring), let alone manipulate with much precision. As someone who's tall (6' 1") with big hands, this was especially a problem for me, because my arms would keep knocking things over and my fingers were too big to fit in the gaps where things had to be placed inside the cup. While building it, the structure was sorta flimsy (but I may have built parts [or a lot of parts] wrong) and unstable, and it fell over multiple times for me (sometimes because my arm hit it heh). All in all, it was a pain to try and put things in the right place even if you understood what your partner wanted you to do, which was really frustrating for me as a builder. After reading this, it may seem like it was a bad structure (or one that I didn't like), but this is actually the ideal structure for WIDI: something that's hard for both writers and builders alike where both are give things that although might be easily replicable, are hard to describe, or easy to describe while hard to replicate. I'm glad that the proctors made such a difficult structure; I was nowhere near perfect and still somehow medalled

Overall A++ (gonna have nightmares for weeks)

Game On (5): Honestly, I'm not sure why Game On is an event in Division C, but whatever . The prompt was pretty normal (I think it was light or photons?) and I thought the proctors ran it very well, with it being orderly and organized. I thought it was a nice touch to have an online clock at the front of the room and I also liked how they had USBs for each team to put their game on.

Overall A

Bridge (8): Not a testing/lab event, but still run very well. I especially liked how they had a debriefing session where you got to figure out why your bridge broke (or didn't, if you're super good like LASA xD) and they even had slow motion cameras too which was awesome

Overall A

All in all, everything was pretty awesome and UW-Stout made this an actually god-tier tournament with the ceremonies and tshirts and stuff

[appleshake123]

Astronomy (1): Actually legendary in terms of how much fun it was to take . As usual, Donna and Tad made a super awesome test that was a good length (we finished with like 3 seconds left heh and were working furiously the entire time) and also pretty hard (still not sure about a couple questions, even after looking them up after the event ). I thought the first part, over DSOs and IDing, was a bit too easy, but the second part was awesome and I honestly wish the entire test was just a ton of questions like that. I especially liked the questions where it gave you a color-color diagram and SEDs of different YSOs and asked you to figure out stuff about them and the question about the brown dwarf and their atmospheres (reminded me of solar system and the phase diagram which was super fun). All in all, this test was pretty much the ideal nationals test and I hope next year they make it even harder and longer than before with even more stimulus/concept questions (like the back half) and super hard DSO questions

Overall A+ (make it even harder and longer though )

From an inside source, Seven Lakes was 1st in astronomy by 10 points from the second place team with a score of like 77 if I'm not mistaken while the 10th place had around 54. He later went on to tell me how impressed he was at Seven Lakes. Great Job!

[Raven]

Invasive Species (3rd): It was definitely sufficient national level, there were some really cool real specimens.

Fossils (4th): It was extremely hard, and I think we guessed on at least half of the test. It was extremely specific, and time was very tight.

Green Generation (15th): It was relatively easy, and there wasn´t a lot of critical thinking. It felt mostly just like ecology.

[windu34]

Dynamic Planet (16): Test was ridiculously easy and we finished in 30 mins. Places were most likely determined based on the one sketchy diagram that was difficult to discern. Top 6 likely based on quality of the drawing.
Invasive Species (27): Very well written test. I probably got about 80-85% of the test correct so I think raw scores were close and came down to the free response (like it should). I only had taxonomy in the form of binomial nomenclature so that messed me up, but overall a good test.

[chalker]

From an inside source, Seven Lakes was 1st in astronomy by 10 points from the second place team with a score of like 77 if I'm not mistaken while the 10th place had around 54. He later went on to tell me how impressed he was at Seven Lakes. Great Job!

Note these numbers aren't quite correct, but close enough to get the point you are making across.

[Adi1008]

Astronomy (1): Actually legendary in terms of how much fun it was to take . As usual, Donna and Tad made a super awesome test that was a good length (we finished with like 3 seconds left heh and were working furiously the entire time) and also pretty hard (still not sure about a couple questions, even after looking them up after the event ). I thought the first part, over DSOs and IDing, was a bit too easy, but the second part was awesome and I honestly wish the entire test was just a ton of questions like that. I especially liked the questions where it gave you a color-color diagram and SEDs of different YSOs and asked you to figure out stuff about them and the question about the brown dwarf and their atmospheres (reminded me of solar system and the phase diagram which was super fun). All in all, this test was pretty much the ideal nationals test and I hope next year they make it even harder and longer than before with even more stimulus/concept questions (like the back half) and super hard DSO questions

Overall A+ (make it even harder and longer though )

From an inside source, Seven Lakes was 1st in astronomy by 10 points from the second place team with a score of like 77 if I'm not mistaken while the 10th place had around 54. He later went on to tell me how impressed he was at Seven Lakes. Great Job!

Thanks you!! It means a lot
Looks like the test was pretty hard; both 77 and 54 sound quite low (although I don't know what max score was, but considering its length I thought it would have been considerably more)

From an inside source, Seven Lakes was 1st in astronomy by 10 points from the second place team with a score of like 77 if I'm not mistaken while the 10th place had around 54. He later went on to tell me how impressed he was at Seven Lakes. Great Job!

Note these numbers aren't quite correct, but close enough to get the point you are making across.

Thanks for the clarification chalker (y)
If possible, could you post the top 6ish scores?

Additionally, (this is kinda random) do you guys think one could email the proctors and ask them if we could see what we missed? There were some really interesting problems that even after a couple of days of researching them, I'm not quite sure what the answer should be

[dcrxcode]

I know the tests and keys for astronomy are posted on AAVSO at some point - any idea when?

[syo_astro]

I know the tests and keys for astronomy are posted on AAVSO at some point - any idea when?

So this has been posted a few times on the Astro C topic, but I want to remind that the Astro event switched sponsors to NASA, and I believe the only tests we put up now should be on the main page (https://www.soinc.org/astronomy_c). Also note there are a few that link away from that page to an event supervisor's page. Typically it doesn't get put up right away, but it should be soon enough (couple of days, a week?).

Also, thank you guys for enjoying my surprises there at the end (Note: I didn't write Section C, #4, but ah you guys did ask what color-color diagrams were used for hehe...).

[humanbeingofearth548]

Fossils (lower than 10th)- The test was surprisingly really good, with some questions being very tricky...Does anyone from Division B remember the "what is the trilobite doing" (or something like that) question? We asked about it, and at the end of the test, the very enthusiastic (YAY!) proctor told us the answer, which was NOT what we expected. One of my favorite tests, even if we didn't do well

[kenniky]

Chem Lab (1): Honestly, not a great test. Stations suck, too many questions, and the majority of the gases problems were literally spamming PV=nRT with way too many unit conversions (I now know that 1 oz = 29 mL off the top of my head). The balancing was absurd, the kinetics questions were free, and the lab portions were virtually nonexistent.
Score: D+

Game On (23): Super well run, and the event supervisor was nice enough that he said I could email him afterwards for a copy of my game. He also asked us before we went in what should be improved about the event. The only problem I have with Game On is the rubric; everything else was top quality.
Score: A+

Wind Power (23): Also extremely well run. The rig was good quality, the test was fair, and the event supervisors knew what they were doing.
Score: A+

Write It Do It (19): This thing made me cry, it was so freaking hard. I guess that's a good thing though, it separates the good from the great. Still, there was so much random stuff everywhere - I almost didn't notice the paper clip jammed into the back for instance. I'm going to have nightmares for days to come @_@
Score: A-