Poorly Run Event Stories

[Clematis]

At MIT Invite last month:

Got to Rocks and Minerals and was sitting at a station with no specimen with my partner, who had come from forensics, which had been held in a location ~15 minutes away. She had sprinted over because of forensics having gone slightly over the time slot, but we entered the Rocks room in time and were ready to take the test. Another competitor in the room told the event supervisors that her partner wasn't there yet because she was also coming from Forensics, and the entire room waited about 10 minutes for that one partner to arrive. That meant that all of the teams sitting at stations with the real specimen had those 10 minutes to finish IDing before the test actually began.

Also, the labels on the specimen were very prone to falling off, and I think some of them ended up getting switched around :/

It was quite frustrating, and I kind of expected better from MIT

I agree. I wasn't in the same event block so I didn't experience the 10-minute delay problem, but the stickers falling off was really irritating. It was challenging enough to ID the many specimens they had per station in the short time frame without the stress of figuring out what specimens matched up with which fallen stickers.

[Skink]

More fun from this past weekend:

Anatomy (Iso_45678 above took this test, seems): the supervisor copied worksheets he had and handwrote question numbers and answer letters. Really? Laziness like this not only sells short the program but an awesome field, too.

Fast Facts: The supervisor didn't even try to balance the categories at all, so they skewed heavily towards biology. I find that unfair. Now, this doesn't seem as bad as some of the things listed in this topic, but the way folks run this event really decides how others are going to view it. It's not supposed to be Zoology Bowl, and, yet...

[Iso_45678]

More fun from this past weekend:

Anatomy (Iso_45678 above took this test, seems): the supervisor copied worksheets he had and handwrote question numbers and answer letters. Really? Laziness like this not only sells short the program but an awesome field, too.

Not only that, he allowed a team to use three cheat sheets. He was very nice though. Almost too nice...

[Jaajer]

At our last regionals, they had three testing events in the college's theater which was the same place where they gave out the medals. We had to take the tests on the little fold out desks in the seats, and only a third of the seats had them. Each event had its own section on the seats so the two events on the sides didn't have enough room to space us out in the rows, so I ended up taking a test with my arm brushing up against someone from another team.

[antoine_ego]

At a regionals, the event supervisor for Astronomy basically took all 30 questions off the SSSS tests. I saw several of Adi's questions show up, as well as a huge amount of rwayzataso's questions. It was awful because all the other teams had the tests in their binders, and I was going off memory. Lesson learned, have test exchange tests in your binder.

[maxxxxx]

Wind Power at SOUP today was a little disappointing. For some reason a lot of CDs wouldn't fully attach to the motor for low speed, and several turbines ended up flying off and breaking, which wouldn't have been as bad(still pretty bad though) if we didn't have to do low speed before high speed. They also started the timing period without our consent on both speeds which was pretty annoying.

[AidsToaster]

Princeton Hydrogeo-- Not to hate it was there first year (?)

No part 2, only table and contaminants for part 3 and pretty much the whole test was contaminant based.

[CMS AC]

(Deleted)

[windu34]

Many things were run poorly at the florida southeast regionals yesterday, but I think the way in which hovercraft was run takes the cake. First of all, they used the same test for div B and C meaning it was ridiculously easy, but even worse was the build portion. I go to the supervisor and ask for the target time and the response was "well in the rules, it says the target time is between 5 and 25 seconds, so just get between there and the computer will figure the rest out". Needless to say, the event was thrown out and no medals were awarded.

[Clematis]

Remote Sensing is one of those events where the emphasis changes from year to year. This year, the emphasis is climate change. Previous years had water cycle, forests, etc. The emphasis on what satellites we need to know has also changed. It's always frustrating when an invitational has a test modeled more on the example set by tests from previous years rather than the current rules.