National Test Discussion

[Tailsfan101]

Event - (finish) Description

Dynamic Planet B - (50) Very well run event, despite my disappointing finish (I was doing it alone, so yeah) I thought the test was well designed. It wasn't all over the place (as some of my practice tests were) and was fairly straightforward on what to put down. Plus, after the test, I got candy! (lol ) 8/10

Road Scholar - (51) Not as well designed as Dynamic Planet, the first few questions were pretty confusing (as was almost the whole test!), such as "What paper was this printed on?" and "What ink was used on this map?" or "How many of Ohio's presidents died in office?" Probably the worst test I took. 4/10

Fast Facts - (59) My partner and I had some fun with this test (despite our dull finish) and this was fairly straightforward. Some categories were hard (i.e. Famous Female Scientists) but all were descriptive on what to put (i.e. Unstable Chemicals). 9/10

Disease Detectives B - (16) My partner (Nerd_Bunny) and I found this test to be somewhat easy and we scored the best finish on our whole team. The test consisted of two sections (Part I - Are you sure you want to go swimming?) (Part II - Drink your Milk) where we analyzed two diseases and their progressions and answered questions about them. It was a long test (23 pages!) but we got through it. Great job by whoever designed this test! 10/10

[laidlawe18]

Division C

Robot Arm (25): Run super well. Our arm didn't perform nearly as well as we wanted it too, but that has nothing to do with the running of the event itself. Everything was super transparent and centered around helping the teams do as well as they could within the rules.

Chem Lab (32): I personally felt this was an awful test. There were 5 stations, 8 minutes each, one of which was the lab. The lab was coffee cup calorimetry with only water, which seemed a little lame, but that part was fine. Each other station, however, had 25 questions to do in 8 minutes, which is insane. I think I barely could've read through all of them in the time frame. My partner and I probably finished ~5-10 questions per station, probably getting around half of them wrong, which would means that we probably got a 25% or less, which seems like poor test design. Many of the questions were also poor quality I thought. There were like 20 questions that were just PV=nRT with weird imperial units, and I found at least one question that was a blatant repeat from another station. All the stations were also in a fume hood (even the test ones) and my partner and I each hit our head at least twice.

Experimental Design (52): Not sure exactly what went wrong here in terms of placement, because we did pretty much everything on the rubric. The materials they gave us were pretty stupid I thought and non-conducive to a scientific experiment. I can understand them doing all the teams at the same time, for integrity's sake, but sacrificing the quality of the event itself doesn't really seem worth it.

[PizzaIsLife]

Final Team Rank (32) - RIP

Ecology (12) - The test reminds me of GG tests, and I'd rather have "sit-down" test than stations, but the ES was very humorous ("Hands Up!" - for those who get it).

Meteorology (23) - I got tripped up trying to find all the pictures when me and my partner split up the test. I liked the test itself, as it covered everything pretty well

Experimental Design (27) - Not the best to take in the morning. Pretty decent experiment in my opinion, but not everyone had the same materials (some had graduated cylinders, and some had beakers), and were told to trade if we did not like what we got

Mission Possible (39) - the judges were pretty professional and thorough

Scrambler - I did not do this event, but I heard that the judge was bad

[winchesetr]

This might be because this was my last nationals (thus, I'm a bit sentimental), but I found my three events to be super well run!

Chemistry Lab (3): Ok, this was.... interesting. I walked out of that test room in a daze and feeling pretty awful. From what I had heard from other competitors, this was different than previous nats tests. It wasn't that the math or the concepts were difficult. It was that the entire event was a time-crunch. It ranged from 20-40 questions per station for 4 stations of test, and 8 minutes per station. Each question required copious dimensional analysis, and you could not take the test nor the answer sheet apart which was super difficult when your partner was working on a different page than you were. Multiple choice ranged from A-H, and every. single. question. was in Fahrenheight (or Rankine). However, it was nice that they gave us the conversions. We ended up finishing about 1/3 - 1/2 of each station and circling random answers for the rest. That wasn't great. Although the test was super long, I definitely would have appreciated some more in-depth concepts and topics as opposed to just a bunch of math. Oh well, still a great test. You definitely had to know what you were doing going in to it. 8/10

Disease Detectives (3): Good test, although it was definitely a lot easier and shorter than normal. The entire second case study had 0 math. But, it was a classic CDC test, thus it was a time crunch even if it was shorter than normal. My partner and I ended up not being able to finish 2 questions on sensitivity and specificity from the first case study (thus, 8 points ), because we ran out of time. As to the event supervisor giving out formulas, it really didn't matter because I'm pretty sure everyone knew those formulas anyways? I mean, come on, they are relative risk and odds ratio Overall 9/10.

Microbe Mission (3): Very good test. 120 questions and a gram stain. It was not the most in-depth of tests, but it certainly required a good amount of critical thinking and touched on most if not all of the major topics for the year. I really enjoyed the case-studies/disease ID! Those were super fun (speaking as a Disease person ). Test was a bit of a time crunch, but we still had time to check most of our work and had an answer down for every question. Definitely a better test than most of the invites tests I've ever taken and the microscopy portion was super fun! Definitely a 10/10

[spongeb0b]

Scrambler: There were some technical issues at the beginning. From what I gathered from the teams effected, they had laid out the barrier at the wrong distance than what was advertised. This was not corrected until after 10+ teams had already ran. These teams were allowed to run again and because of this there was a long backlog of teams in line waiting their turn. I also noticed one team perform 3 runs, my guess was because the timer was not ready. One of the two main timers was not very attentive, not pausing the 8 minute timer when the team was done with their setup.

[kenniky]

Chemistry Lab (3): Ok, this was.... interesting. I walked out of that test room in a daze and feeling pretty awful. From what I had heard from other competitors, this was different than previous nats tests. It wasn't that the math or the concepts were difficult. It was that the entire event was a time-crunch. It ranged from 20-40 questions per station for 4 stations of test, and 8 minutes per station. Each question required copious dimensional analysis, and you could not take the test nor the answer sheet apart which was super difficult when your partner was working on a different page than you were. Multiple choice ranged from A-H, and every. single. question. was in Fahrenheight (or Rankine). However, it was nice that they gave us the conversions. We ended up finishing about 1/3 - 1/2 of each station and circling random answers for the rest. That wasn't great. Although the test was super long, I definitely would have appreciated some more in-depth concepts and topics as opposed to just a bunch of math. Oh well, still a great test. You definitely had to know what you were doing going in to it. 8/10

This is actually no different from previous nationals tests, you can check last year's or the year before's.

Jon Aros's Chemistry Lab tests are easily some of the worst quality tests at the National Tournament each year. Our strategy last year, when I got 1st, was to take the previous year's test and literally put it on our cheatsheet because he was known to reuse questions (and he did; about half of the test last year was reused). I'm honestly surprised that he didn't do that this year (from what I've heard) and I hope that this is a step in the right direction, but unfortunately until someone replaces Aros I don't see the quality of Chemistry Lab at Nationals improving significantly.

[EastStroudsburg13]

It's really interesting to go through this thread and see different opinions on the same test by different people. Doesn't mean either opinion is wrong, it's just neat.

[ericlepanda]

Hovercraft (2nd) - the supervisor said that the tracks were perfectly level but they seemed to be slightly sloped upwards. The test was good, there were a few difficult problems and it covered all the topics in the rules. 9/10

Optics (6th) - boxes were set up well, everything regarding the laser shoot was fine. The test was good-it was hard and it covered most of the topics in the rules except optical instruments. 9/10 as well.

Ecology (11th) - Test covered everything in the rules but it was a station test, which I didn't really like I also feel like the problems could've been harder. 8/10

Food Science (14th) - The hot plate that was supposed to heat up water for a chemical bath wasn't turned on, and only our team's hot plate was affected. Because of this, the supervisors gave us an extra five minutes, which was good. The chemical tests and the calorimeter portion was set up nicely, no complaints there. However, the test was difficult as they gave tons of questions on grains and stuff, which adhered to the rules. We just didn't really expect it, as all of our previous tests had more stuff about chemistry. 8/10

[maxxxxx]

Disease Detectives (3): Good test, although it was definitely a lot easier and shorter than normal. The entire second case study had 0 math. But, it was a classic CDC test, thus it was a time crunch even if it was shorter than normal. My partner and I ended up not being able to finish 2 questions on sensitivity and specificity from the first case study (thus, 8 points ), because we ran out of time. As to the event supervisor giving out formulas, it really didn't matter because I'm pretty sure everyone knew those formulas anyways? I mean, come on, they are relative risk and odds ratio Overall 9/10.

How would you compare the difficulty to other hard tests like SOUP or MIT? Looking at past Nats tests and from what I've heard about this one I feel like I would've done pretty decently(maybe top 15).

Also I feel like if you're at Nationals and you didn't know the formula for OR or RR then you probably weren't a big enough threat that the extra help would hurt anyone else.

[varunscs11]

Invasive Species (2) - This test was incredibly easy but this was offset by the 1:30 stations. I didn’t like this test for a multitude of reasons. First, test questions from 2016 were reused. Even though that played to our advantage, I don’t think it’s fair that a proctor simply cut and paste questions from the year before especially when teams can purchase the exams. Second, I hated how the test was a powerpoint because there was no notification when the slide changed. Since all the teams were really close together, you really had to whisper to make sure right answers did not get out and it sucked to have to protect our exam. I really did not like the matching format of the test because it’s really weird to match numbers to letters as opposed to the other way around. It was annoying that the format of the matching changed in the middle and then changed back afterwards. I liked having the pure ID stations because it have a break from having to flip around the binder and I think testing scientific name was good, although I would’ve liked to see more common name. Thank god my partner was really really good at scientific names. Also I did not like that the more trivial biocontrol species were chosen. Overall 5/10

Rocks and Minerals (4) - I expected this test to be the way it was because I had taken the proctor’s fossils exams. The specimens were really nice and the time crunch was very real. I was happy that the proctor gave streak plates and glass when necessary because some of these minerals are absolutely indistinguishable without certain diagnostic tests. I wasn’t a fan of all the questions being multiple choice but I do think this test tested whether you knew your information because there was no way you could flip through a binder and get answers for everything. I thought the specular hematite and botroyidal goethite was smart because whenever you see a botryidal mineral you think hematite. Even though we missed that question, I thought it was incredibly crafty and is characteristic of how a Nationals test question should be. Overall 7/10

Anatomy and Physiology (9) - This test was hard. The BAC formula did not work and that was annoying. The treatments portion of the test was very hard and was probably what determined event placements. I didn’t like how this test was almost all nervous system because that defeats the purpose of having the other two systems. The random trivia number questions were just plain out stupid because they didn’t actually test any understanding of the human body. Better than the last 10 years of Anatomy tests. Overall 7/10

Ecology (41) - We won this event at MIT and Golden Gate and we got 41st at Nationals, which dropped our overall team placing from 6th to 8th. This was actually one of the exams I was expecting to be good but lo and behold, it’s terrible. Someone told me that the proctor wrote this exam the night before. Come on, you have an entire year to write a Nationals exam and you chose to wait until the last minute. You may not care about writing a high quality test or may not even want to be at a tournament on a Saturday, but it means everything to us and if you don’t wanna put in the time necessary to respect all the time competitors have put into the event, then you should get out and stop being a event supervisor. The proctor’s lack of effort was quite apparent in the test. Her green generation tests were actually very good because they focused on having competitors reading charts and graphs and drawing conclusions from those graphs. Yet this test was poorly done in that exact same way. The charts were basic and the questions asked about them were like which source of energy changed the least in a year or how much did the population of moths decrease. Last time I checked, this was a high school event and the questions asked were more on the elementary level. The biomes station was even worse in that she asked us to order biomes in terms of primary production and this was 4 different questions (which biome has the most, 2nd most, 3rd most, 4th most). Any person that started studying the night before or even the day of would’ve gotten these questions right. This station honestly made me feel like the proctor just needed to hit a certain question length and didn’t care at all whether the questions were easy or worthy of a National exam. The reclamation station was good in that it asked for the advantages and disadvantages of the method but it was tested in a poor and lazy way. Having 6 different categories and then asked competitors to categorize words like time, cost, biodiversity into A (advantage) or B (disadvantage) is just plain negligent. The chance of getting the question right is 50-50 and that’s just too high for Nationals, were places are determined by tenths of a point. Overall this event was just plain garbage and sloppy. This proctor has shown us that she is incapable of writing a Nationals level exam and should never write another Nationals exam again. To all those committee chairs out there, y’all need to get your proctors in line. There are too many proctors who cling to this idea that because we are high schoolers we don’t know anything and they make their tests way too short and rudimentary. For someone who has read all of wikipedia, college level textbooks like the Princeton Guide to Ecology, and spend hundreds of hours preparing for this test, administering a garbage test is just plain disrespectful and a display of Science Olympiad’s negligence with ensuring test quality. The proctors of Remote Sensing and Dynamic Planet are a prime example of proctors that write hard exams and test the limits of our knowledge - these are the people that should be the majority, yet they are in the minority. Certain events out there with proctors who have been writing the test for decades need to be removed and younger, new event supervisors need to be appointed. We may not have degrees and Ph.D’s, but we can most certainly write better exams than y’all and that should be a major red flag to the advisory committee. You know the exam was poorly written when there was a SEVEN WAY tie. How did the proctor even break the tie when there were only 3 very easy tie breakers (3! is 6 and 6 is less than 7)? Did she just flip a coin? What’s odd is that the Hopkins School, which got 30th-50th in all of its events, got 2nd in Ecology. This is not to say that they didn’t put in any time or effort but why was it that Ecology was the only event they did extremely well in? Another interesting statistic is that LASA, Clements, Mounds View, Adlai, and Northville all received 30th or worse in this event. Anyways, thank you for the one person from the Nationals staff who responded to my coaches emails when no one else would. Overall this event gets a 0/10

Wright State - This was by far the worst nationals I have been to. Don’t get me wrong, there were some nice things like the apartments and the event rooms. By the time my state was finished, there were no meal plans left and there were no linens left. And we barely even got on campus housing. The pre awards banquet tickets were sold out. The fact that we have to pay 21$ to attend a banquet is ridiculous. This begs the question, why are you event hosting a national tournament when you cannot accommodate all the teams? I hope that future National tournaments learn from this and improve upon it.

Thanks to SONT 2017 and Robyn Fischer for making this Nationals unforgettable. I'll never forget it.