Science Olympiad at MIT Invitational 2021

[nobodynobody]

Reflection because that's what the cool kids are doing

Astronomy: 1st ! !

hard to believe this happened ( u @aimer). The test was super interesting and unconventional but pretty fun. My partner did section A + half of B, and I did the rest. Section C was quite a wild ride... I messed up on so many calculations (the 2nd question xD). Luckily, It seems as if we won because our section c score was pretty high. TBH there were a lot of free points, like the M87 questions and the fact that you could search up the radiated power from the Hulse-Taylor binary system instead of calculating it . I did skip most of section C. Section B was pretty challenging as well to do it in the timeframe we were given. Very good and creative questions.

Sounds: 3rd
RIP WILLS STREAK. gg to wwpn and wwps.

Fantasy SO: 18th and 2nd
poggggggggggg. troys not the only one to lose cuz of waqua rip. can we count digital structures and only digital structures instead???

Team: 2nd
Most surprised at this one lmfao. Was not expecting us to get 2nd.... more like 4th. Rip to code being trialed. Phenomenal performance by wwpn (win nats this year?!!). Also carmel op.

[pb5754]

Event Reviews:

Astronomy (2nd): Was a very fun and very challenging test. I think there was a good range of easy and difficult questions. I did section A and around half of section B, and my partner did section C and the rest of section B. Maybe some more DSO questions would have been nice, but oh well. I'm really curious about the section C score distribution because of how insanely difficult that was, but apparently MIT won't be releasing detailed statistics, so I guess we'll never know . 10/10

Fossils (31st): I don't really know why I did so bad. I guess I'm just better at more standard speed-based tests rather than this kind of test. I certainly would have preferred having more ID than there was, though I guess this had more to do with the test being open-internet than anything else. 8/10

Geologic Mapping (6th): We did pretty well, though I have a couple regrets now after hearing that the top scores were all pretty close. We did pretty bad on the math, but I guess that's primarily a consequence of virtual tournaments. As with all other Unome tests, this test was great. 10/10

Protein Modeling (15th): Was certainly a fun test with fun questions, though my partners and I were pretty annoyed that there pretty much wasn't a single actual CRISPR question on the test. I mostly worked on sections 1-3, but I heard that the jmol section didn't really require you to know much about jmol either. Overall, it was a decent test, but certainly not my favorite. 7.5/10

Overall (11th, superscored 4th): I was always skeptical about whether or not open-internet would work, and, after the competition, I think it's fair to say it did not work as well as intended. The test quality was certainly not as high as last year. Though a few writers definitely did adjust to open-internet well, others did not. I think I would have strongly preferred to have taken the risk that a few people here or there might cheat in exchange for better test quality overall. Beyond that, I guess I'm pretty happy with our performance as a team, especially given that it was our first invitational of the season. 6/10

Congrats to North for their win!

[sciolyperson1]

Overall (11th, superscored 4th): I was always skeptical about whether or not open-internet would work, and, after the competition, I think it's fair to say it did not work as well as intended. The test quality was certainly not as high as last year. Though a few writers definitely did adjust to open-internet well, others did not. I think I would have strongly preferred to have taken the risk that a few people here or there might cheat in exchange for better test quality overall. Beyond that, I guess I'm pretty happy with our performance as a team, especially given that it was our first invitational of the season. 6/10

> first invitational of the season
> superscored 3rd

:monkaS:

[sneepity]

Overall (11th, superscored 4th): I was always skeptical about whether or not open-internet would work, and, after the competition, I think it's fair to say it did not work as well as intended. The test quality was certainly not as high as last year. Though a few writers definitely did adjust to open-internet well, others did not. I think I would have strongly preferred to have taken the risk that a few people here or there might cheat in exchange for better test quality overall. Beyond that, I guess I'm pretty happy with our performance as a team, especially given that it was our first invitational of the season. 6/10

> first invitational of the season
> superscored 3rd

:monkaS:

ok bruh yall superscored 1st at bearso so idk what ur point is

[Name]

Hey y'all,

Along with Sahil Pontula and April Cheng, I was one of the event supervisors for Astronomy at the MIT Invitational this year. With 150 teams, open-internet tests, and being held entirely virtually, writing a test for this tournament presented quite a challenge, but I sincerely hope every team that took our test had a fulfilling experience. In the end, the exam was 125 questions long for a total of 215 points. We'll be using data from MIT to help us write and structure the exam at Nationals, so if you have any feedback, I strongly recommend that you let us know through this form.

Without further ado, here are some statistics and the score distribution:

Standard deviation: 20.0
Average: 73.23
Median: 70.83
Maximum: 125.83

This was my third year supervising Astronomy at the MIT Invitational, and I have mixed feelings about having a tournament with so many teams and being open-internet. I feel that the types of questions that make for a good open-internet exam aren't suited for ranking 150 extremely diverse teams or being completed in 50 minutes (for example, my open-internet exams in university generally have ~2 questions that we have to complete within a week), but that's a discussion for another time.

Thanks to everyone on the planning committee for their work towards running this great tournament, and congratulations to everyone that completed in the event. If any of y'all have any questions, don't hesitate to ask in this thread and I'll do my best to answer them.

[Giantpants]

astro (5): solid test with good breadth of difficulty. part b was surprisingly difficult and while I didn't do part c, I heard it was extremely difficult. great length of test, as I just barely managed to finish my sections on the test and this was exactly what I expected from a mit test. my one criticism would be the extent of the mcqs (since I didn't do part c I essentially took a 100 question mcq test) and I would have liked more critical thinking questions especially pertaining DSOs. the questions themselves were very high quality and I definitely have a lot to learn from section b alone.

Astronomy: The test was super interesting and unconventional but pretty fun. My partner did section A + half of B, and I did the rest. Section C was quite a wild ride... I messed up on so many calculations (the 2nd question xD). Luckily, It seems as if we won because our section c score was pretty high. TBH there were a lot of free points, like the M87 questions and the fact that you could search up the radiated power from the Hulse-Taylor binary system instead of calculating it . I did skip most of section C. Section B was pretty challenging as well to do it in the timeframe we were given. Very good and creative questions.

Astronomy (2nd): Was a very fun and very challenging test. I think there was a good range of easy and difficult questions. I did section A and around half of section B, and my partner did section C and the rest of section B. Maybe some more DSO questions would have been nice, but oh well. I'm really curious about the section C score distribution because of how insanely difficult that was, but apparently MIT won't be releasing detailed statistics, so I guess we'll never know . 10/10

Yeah, I completely agree with you there with regard to the multiple choice questions. In my mind, the "ideal" astronomy exam is just like what we have at Nationals, where everything is completely free response. However, with 150 teams and limited time to grade, I don't think we had much of a choice but to go with a lot of MC, especially since we needed a good amount of easy questions to help separate teams. Writing exams for these virtual tournaments is a torturous optimization problem with so many different variables, and the feedback we get here will go a long way towards making the Nationals test the best it can be.

I'm surprised so many teams seemed to split the test so cleanly (either A/B and C or A + 0.5B and 0.5B + C); back when I competed, my partner and I had the very refined strategy of "everyone does everything". We saved most of the "interesting" questions for Section C, which might have made a difference in how people perceived the exam. This included some questions about M87, which was one of the DSOs. These DSO questions were meant to be relatively tough, and a miniscule amount of teams got any points at all on them. Even with the "free points" we hid within Section C, teams seemed to struggle a lot, so I didn't mind that they could search up some questions.

We attempted to put some more interesting/difficult DSO questions on this exam (e.g. including those questions about M87 in Section C), and it looks like we could have gone even further. However, I think it's important to note that competitors like y'all represent a narrow slice of the Science Olympiad community as a whole, and many teams don't want super-hard DSO questions. A lot of coaches have talked to me about how their students view DSOs as the accessible entry point to the event, and we have to balance their needs as well. Beyond that, there are some pseudo-political reasons we try to keep the DSO questions relatively accessible that I didn't learn until I joined the A-Team after graduating from high school.

[EwwPhysics]

(rip my abysmal placements )

Fossils (28th): Other people had a lot of complaints about the test but I liked the emphasis on isotopes/half life and stuff like that. Would've liked some more... normal... ID. Overall, very fun test to take. 8/10

Protein Modeling (32nd): Our placement was a bit of a disappointment, I was hoping for a t25 :/ but similar test to UT Austin; extremely difficult, made me cry, etc. I would have liked to see some actual jmol on the "jmol section" (although when we got our graded test back I did get to laugh at the fact that we got 2 points out of 100 on that section ) 7.5/10

Designer Genes (41st): I want to blame my bad placement on the meh test and warm body partner but that's not really how it works :/ In terms of the test, I was definitely disappointed in it. In the weeks leading up to the competition, I focused mainly of application problems (cough christopher wang tests) but found no problems like this when I took the test. Most problems were obscure facts which probably no one had on their cheat sheets and everyone had to google, which I feel is not what an open-internet test should be like. 3/10

Circuit Lab (60th): I'm a warm body, not exactly an expert on circuit lab, but I could tell that this was a weird test. At least half of it was digital logic (but hey, at least I got to use my cSp kNoWLeDge). Don't have much else to say. 7/10

Overall (41st, superscore 23rd): Overall, I had been expecting higher quality tests, and I thought that the approach to open internet could have been better. The awards ceremony was a good pace, and the LMMM presentation was fun. I appreciated that it was self schedule. 6.5/10

[TheSquaad]

I will add that, from my experience, Scilympiad's format made many question types (ie drawing graphs) borderline impossible. The only real alternative was having students submit drawn-answers via a separate medium (ie as done in Experimental Design), but that presented other challenges with uploading/receiving things properly (which definitely came up in events that had implemented those). So for my exam (Machines), although I would've liked to require things like free-body diagrams and graphs, since those were not integral to the event, I elected to avoid them and change the format accordingly.

Just a bit of additional context regarding why tests this year turned out pretty different.

[IHateClouds]

dp (10) : It was a really great test! Some of the math was a little obscure but overall I thought it was pretty cool :3 I really liked the explanation of like graphs and maps and stuff!!! The quotes kinda bugged me tho because they were distracting and fairly unimportant for the actual test, but I liked how the sections were split clearly. I was really surprised we placed since i thought we were gonna get 40th >O< also the seal was so cute :pleading: 10/10

geomaps (14): not much to say for geomaps since unome is really cool and always writes great tests XD. I was a little disappointed there weren't any like theoretical math draw your own diagram type questions because those are my favorite but that's super minor 9/10

overall (23) : it was really cool for my first time competing at MIT! Mainly because of the really cool tests :3 Unlike others I didnt really have an issue with open internet because the two tests I took were long and well-adapted to open-internet. 10/10

[l0lit]

test feedback

Codebusters (4): While a lot of people complained about how the test was weird, I felt like this was something that MIT would pull. It did test on skill at cryptography overall at least, but the point distributions seemed off and several of them (for example, the pangram) were just guessing. It's a fun test to take, just not at a competition. Also rip people cheating leading to my best placement being trialled

LMMM (6): Lots more TikTok than I expected, while there should be a few, it still wasn't really the dominating source of memes imo. The meme theory section was pretty interesting, however. Pre-builds did well in scoring but didn't make awards

WICI (11): I was the CADer. Just why. FreeCAD is already bad enough, but then re-orienting every piece so it doesn't even move via x/y/z unless you can somehow orient it back first was just cruel. The point of WICI/WIDI is for the challenge to be in understanding your partner's instructions to know where to place the piece, not the actual challenge of moving it. For reference, I thought we bombed because I only moved like 4 pieces. This is 11th.

Geomapping (16): 1 placement away from placing in every event, pain. However, the test was really good, and I know what I need to focus on when learning mapping, since usually tests are not that challenging in the mapping section. Thanks Unome!

Overall (8): 6th if Code wasn't trialled, even more pain. However, I think it's a great improvement from what we were last year so I'm glad to see it. MIT as an invite was really fun too, I appreciate how accessible the event supervisors are to ask questions. The awards ceremony could've used a bit more memes to match with the higher amount of talking and speeches, however those were cool too. Big in-person awards ceremony stalling for time vibes, it's refreshing this year. 10/10 would attend online again, probably still too far to do in-person though.