Rickards Science Olympiad Invitational 2020

[jaggie34]

^same goes for Circuit Lab for me!

[sciolyperson1]

B superscore: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/ ... tput_3.pdf

C superscore: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/ ... tput_4.pdf

[will926ok3645]

Hello all!
I was the supervisor for both Crime Busters and Forensics. It was exciting to see what you all did, and everyone should be proud of their work. I was very impressed with the work done by you all. Here's a commentary on what I saw along with a graphical depiction of team scores. This exam did err on the easy-but-long side, so do keep that in mind with future event endeavors
Crime Busters

Rickards 2020- Crime Busters B.PNG (21.67 KiB) Viewed 3367 times

Besides the few outliers at the back end of the exam, the scores were fairly uniform and fit along the regression line. There isn't too much to note, besides some teams answering things that weren't on the rules. About 25% of teams correctly identified Blue as the culprit! Regardless, teams did a good job identifying the main portions but did not always associate it with the correct suspect.
Forensics

Rickards 2020- Forensics C.PNG (22.13 KiB) Viewed 3367 times

This is one of the best r-squared values I have seen and is exactly what I want with my exams. The imposter was rarely identified correctly, with over four times as many responses for brown than the real culprit, Red. This is due to a few common misattributions of compounds to suspects and misidentifying horse hair as human hair. There were no glaring miscues on the exam that encompassed multiple teams. As with the Crime Busters exam, this exam focused on the quantity of questions over their difficulty.

Feel free to reach out with any inquiries. I look forward to seeing many of you in future competitions!

[jaggie34]

Hi all,
I was the ES for Circuit Lab last weekend! The score distribution for the event was... interesting, so I'll get right into it:

Division C

Rank vs Score (1).png (15.5 KiB) Viewed 3316 times

chart (1).png (8.32 KiB) Viewed 3316 times

Out of: 240
Mean: 82.03448276
Q1: 54.25
Med: 87
Q3: 103.75
St. Dev.: 36.11723869
High: 149

At first glance, the score distribution was nothing too wild. However, there are a few oddities I'd like to point out:

1. The difference in score between 12th and 14th was the same as the difference between 14th and 29th.
2. There were a total of 14 ties, including 2 three-team ties

These have led me to the conclusion that although the test was able to discern between the top teams and the "middle of the pack" relatively well, there was not enough done to separate many of those middle of the pack teams, as most of the ties were in the 10s and 20s. I can think of a few reasons for this being the case. First off, there weren't enough 'medium-difficulty' questions on the test that could be used to separate teams. I'll be looking into this in my future tests, as this likely played the biggest role. Second, there were a number of questions that could easily be found using a quick internet search, and these questions were answered correctly more often than I anticipated (i.e. a question about another name for Esaki diodes, a quick google search will immediately show they are known as tunnel diodes). Let me be clear that I do not think the reason that these questions were answered correctly was because teams used the internet, it was almost certainly because teams were just more knowledgeable about those topics than I assumed they would be. However, since it could be an explanation, I figured I would still list it here. Lastly, simple statistics played a role. Again, because of the questions' difficulties and point values, teams were bound to get similar scores, and so things were pretty tightly grouped. This was also magnified by many teams not getting many points for the circuit analysis questions, which may have been too hard for this competition.

One last thing: There were two instances of ties in which all tiebreaker questions were answered the same. In this case, I ended up using first time submitted and then questions attempted as a tiebreaker. ALWAYS ATTEMPT EVERY QUESTION! It can and will make a difference!

Division B

Rank vs Score (3).png (11.57 KiB) Viewed 3316 times

(Sorry no histogram, it wont let me download)
Out of: 187
Mean: 54.94117647
Q1: 36
Med: 52
Q3: 76
St. Dev.: 24.24613831
High: 102

There isn't too much to say here as the tests from the two divisions were mostly the same, but there's the score distribution.

If anyone has any questions feel free to DM me!

[reninkidney]

Did anybody receive any Rickards medals?

[vye904]

Did anybody receive any Rickards medals?

I believe the school is experiencing trouble with their district/admin approval process, at least that was the case when I last asked in February. Not sure if they're still planning to get them out since it's been a while.