Poorly Run Event Stories

[Nerd_Bunny]

I'm not really complaining, because I did medal in this, but this year at the NEBO invitational the Disease Detectives test was 100 questions. Half of them were vocab + examples of each term. It took a really long time and no one finished, which I was a bit sad about, because some of those questions looked interesting.

[sciencepeeps]

The invitational I went to yesterday was all over the place.
The towers event supervisors must not have understood the event. They tiered a team because the ring went TOO FAR down the tower. The bonus circle was drawn onto a foam board. Now, this would have been okay if the teams measured the tower to see if it made the bonus and then tested it on a normal testing surface, but no. We had to test the tower ON THE FOAM BOARD. It was not even a firm foam board, it was squishy. By the time we tested, the last tower of the day, the foam board had been RUPTURED AND BROKEN by other teams. We still had to test on it. Needless to say, we failed.
The other poorly run event that I attended was anatomy. It was a forty question test, with most of them multiple choice. There were only two diagrams which were extremely simple! They were cartoon drawings. Usually when there is an easy test, one question can make all the difference, so we should have checked over. But no. There were two tiebreakers. The first tiebreaker was “the even numbered questions” (test writer was probably lazy, but whatever). But the second tiebreaker was TIME. So we got third.

[321Kaboom]

I too was at the Grayslake invitational and the towers was terribly run. They did have a FOAM BOARD that was so SQUISHY there were DENTS and HOLES everywhere from previous towers. Because of this it was very uneven and SHAKY even though our tower was perfectly leveled. We asked the supervisors if we could measure to see if it met the bonus and then test on the normal table and they said that we couldn’t because everyone else had to do it that way too. I was fuming, and when we put the tower on it started to wobble and failed.

WIDI at Grayslake was also questionable. When the writers were writing, the builders had 25 minutes of free time, and normally we just chat but the proctor said, “Hey guys, you can go on your phones if you want.” And then he left the room. I remembered at other invitationals that confiscated our phones and watches so we could not CHEAT, but he literally let us go on our phones and do WHATEVER THE HECK we wanted. That was very poorly supervised and he never made us put our phones away when were were doing the actual building which was very SHADY.

[nebulamew]

In Battery Buggy, we had a bad proctor. First of all, one of our teams got DQ’d because they went over the line. When we went to argue about the rules, the team got to try again, and was barely off the line. However, they DIDN’T EVEN PLACE!! All because the proctor used different units of measurement for each score.

[Otkrlj]

At warrensburg on satterday, mousetrap was a mess. First of all, we got a penalty despite not getting one at our last compatition. When we tried to argue the ruleing, he said he was going by his definition of the rules so qe got a 2000 point penalty. Then, when we got to the run, the minnimun cup distance live was an a bump so the cup triped over it and we were short on the cup distance. On our secound run, we had to adjust our string to fix it but that added around 5 secounts to our time.

[CC-1616]

At the 2018 Orange County Regional Competition, the Solar System test was wack. This year, the topic for the event revolved around he inner solar system, such as Mercury, Venus, and Mars. It also was suppost to include things like the asteroid belt, as well as asteroids in general. However, at the regional competition, I am pretty sure that the proctor or whoever wrote the test got lazy, because the test had NOTHING to do with the rules. The test was asking about things like exoplanets, the different surfaces of Pluto, as well as a bunch of stuff on comets and Europa. I was asking one of my coaches who did solar system the last time it was around, and he said that that particular test sounded like one he had for an invitational in his first year of science Olympiad (he is an junior in high school). So, thanks proctor for recycling a 3-4 year old test!

[sciencepeeps]

Just came out of another tournament. It seems like all the events were poorly run. I have been hearing tons of stories. Someone had time as a tiebreaker. Someone got a Div C test for a DIFFERENT EVENT. I heard that the Road scholar test did not have a topographic map. Most of the test were taken off the test exchange. They allowed people to cheat on WIDI and towers (you can’t let a writer switch to builder IN THE MIDDLE OF THE EVENT!) In experimental design, the proctor took 15 minutes to read the event sheet sent out by Sicily that explains the rules. Then, she proceeded to ask the class, “Does anyone know what this event is about? Because I don’t.” Ugh. They are grading the tests too.

[321Kaboom]

At Nequa Valley Invitational the WIDI SUCKED!!!!! The proctor for the building room was good, but for the writing room, YEESH. In the middle of the event while we were waiting, so kid suddenly said, WAIT IM THE WRITER!!!!! And we were in the buulders room. The proctor said, no you CANNOT leave, which was understandable. But then a few minutes later, his partner comes in the room and said they needed to switch. It was so STUPID. The kid had already seen the structure and could build it from memory. He should have been TIERED. The proctor in our room seemed triggered because she probably knew it was against the rules, but didn’t say anything. The proctor in the other room had NO IDEA what she was doing.

Also at Thermodynamics, they did not allow teams to do the ice water bonus.

Experimental Design proctors literally had NO IDEA what the event was about. They said at the start, DOES ANYONE KNOW WHAT THIS EVENT IS ACTUALLY ABOUT? And proceeded to read the entire rules sheet for 15 MINUTES! We ran super late and were LATE to the next events.

Potions and Poisons proctors were SO LAZY they literally printed off a DIVISION C test from online. NOBODY KNEW ANYTHING about it. SO TRIGGERING!

TOWERS WAS HORRENDOUS!!!!!! A team before us forgot their goggles, so we offered ours to them, but they declined. They left the testing area to get goggles from their home base and came back. THEY DIDN’T EVEN GET TIERED. The proctor was alright with that. When we went, there were like 6 helpers, all highschoolers, and they kept giving “tips” that were completely WRONG! They were touching the bucket and moving it which disrupted our whole tower, and they told us to move the lever to full, but we didn’t want to do that, and I was so annoyed by the “helpers” and I was fuming afterwards. They just got in the way the whole time.

Mystery Architecture was okay, but the ceiling may have interferred with our tower because ours was TOO TALL!

[Koolman]

Had regionals today, disease detectives test had all the correct multiple choice answers in bold, so basically half of the test was completely useless.

[Otkrlj]

At regionals, mousetrap was crazy. The event was on a concrete floor with rivets so if your car went fast enough, it made it jump. This made our car litterly jump in the air our secound run and go way out of alighnment. To be fair, only my car and pembrokes car were fast enough to be affected by this but it is still anoying