Poorly Run Event Stories

[linzhiyan]

Sounds a bit more disorganized than usual, but other than not using a timer and not measuring, sounds standard. (of course, the small errors made could lead into a major tipping of the scales) However, I hold that nothing could be bad as States last year in measures of misrun Thermo.

Agreed. Last year for states, thermo was completely dropped last year for division B.

[smayya337]

Sounds a bit more disorganized than usual, but other than not using a timer and not measuring, sounds standard. (of course, the small errors made could lead into a major tipping of the scales) However, I hold that nothing could be bad as States last year in measures of misrun Thermo.

Agreed. Last year for states, thermo was completely dropped last year for division B.

OK, that's even worse lol

[JoeyC]

Wow, we aren't even in the same state, but we both had bad States, lol. Thermo can be pretty sketchy at times cause it just takes a lot of dedication to run correctly.

[dxu46]

Sounds a bit more disorganized than usual, but other than not using a timer and not measuring, sounds standard. (of course, the small errors made could lead into a major tipping of the scales) However, I hold that nothing could be bad as States last year in measures of misrun Thermo.

Agreed. Last year for states, thermo was completely dropped last year for division B.

And division C :/

[SluffAndRuff]

Thermo at Cornell today was not the epitome of organization. Overwhelmed by the long line outside their door at impound, the volunteers stopped measuring devices to make sure they fit the regulations and instead opted to simply ask everyone, "Does your box follow the rules?" At the actual event, they didn't keep track of when each team started their device testing (how?!), and our event was interrupted multiple times by people coming in, including a coach who had come to impound his team's device and a team that didn't know about impound. (I actually feel bad for that last one, it was super humiliating...) Maybe I'm pampered since the ES at practically all of my tournaments is the national Thermo ES, but compared to all the Virginia tournaments I've been to, Thermo at Cornell was a mess.

Maybe ur just bad

[TheChiScientist]

Sounds a bit more disorganized than usual, but other than not using a timer and not measuring, sounds standard. (of course, the small errors made could lead into a major tipping of the scales) However, I hold that nothing could be bad as States last year in measures of misrun Thermo.

Agreed. Last year for states, thermo was completely dropped last year for division B.

And division C :/

And Division B for IL...
Thermo Fails:
Cornell Invitational 2019
MO States B&C 2018
IL States B 2018
TX States B 2018
(and probably more...)

[IsaacT]

Last year at my state competition one team showed up late to Rocks&Minerals and instead of just not allowing them to come in for being late the ES starts the whole event over. My teammate and I ended up just looking ahead at the other rocks/minerals from our station because we had already finished the stations we were forced to go back to.

[jimmy-bond]

Disease Detectives at Regionals: the test was taken from a resource online: https://www.cdc.gov/epicasestudies/down ... d_inst.pdf
At an important competition, such as regionals, I expected a new test to be written instead of one taken directly from the Internet. Some of the questions are more subjective than most tests and I personally like objective grading so this test was not one of my favorites.

[sophisSyo]

Two years ago when my friend and I went with my middle school team as ninth graders and we got them to states, we did food science right (I can't remember if this was states or regionals. Maybe states)...so they gave us matches for the calorimetry, but we had to extinguish them in little plastic dishes (like the condiment ones?) that had water, so naturally when I went to extinguish it the flame almost immediately jumped on my gloved hand and burnt through (I was unharmed) before it was extinguished. My partner had just stared in horror...and they had those long reach lighters on a table but didn't use them. Apparently, the other middle school from my district had a similar problem. One of the teammates' (I'm friends with her now lol) sleeves caught on fire and her partner just sat there and laughed.

[SHASO2018]

From states yesterday:

Invasives - if I recall correctly, it had fewer points possible than teams attending the tournament (assuming each question was one point, since I can't recall any multiple-part questions). They also completely reused the outdoor portion from last year's test; the question numbering on the station sheets didn't even match up with this year's answer sheet.

Rocks and Minerals - I think this one might have had as many points possible as there were attending teams, but I doubt it was much more than that. Each station only had a few questions, but they were three minutes long. I liked this one station where we had to rank three specimens by hardness and identify them. In the directions for the station, it said something along the lines of "Identifying these minerals might be difficult in the time allotted [3 minutes], so be sure to rank the hardness first." (And don't get me wrong, these weren't any sort of unusual or ambiguous specimens by any means.)

Anatomy & Physiology - there were several questions that got repeated between two stations. For some reason, they gave two minutes for the station you started at (wherever that may be), but only a minute and thirty seconds for the rest.

I remember Rocks and Minerals that year! Also there was some error of communication for where the room number was so my partner and I got there late. It's sad because I haven't been to states since

Also this brought me back to 2015 when everyone freaked out because a 4. something earthquake happened early in the day so every proctor brought it up.