New Olympian

[kellyjelly]

Hello, I am new here and I am looking forward to competing and starting the next chapter of my life. The try-out tests for the Science Olympiad team in my school is this week. What advice would you give to someone like me about test taking strategies? I also take any information about the Science Olympiad and some tips and advice about competitions.

[Unome]

I've moved this post to the General Competition subforum, as it fits better there.

[RiverWalker88]

Welcome to Science Olympiad and scioly.org!

For tryouts, it's difficult to give specific advice because we don't know the exact format of the tryout you are going to be using; some schools do individual events, while others do event-specific, and others have another way. For test-taking strategies, I'll direct you to the wiki page on test-taking strategies here. Additionally, from experience here are a few pointers. Pay attention to point values of questions - quickly flip through the test and see if there are some 5-pointers you can do. These will really help boost your score, if you can do them. Skip what you don't know - you will want to optimize your time, so try to do what you can first. For long answers, sometimes writing a bit much is a good thing - you want to make sure you cover the point that the graders are looking for, so you might have to be a bit long-winded if there are several possible correct things or explanations you can take. Whoever is grading is going to be looking for understanding, so the more you show that you understand, the better. That said, try not to waste time on these. Don't overwrite on a little one-point question, just make sure you get that point and move on. Double check math, especially on high-point questions - I am really bad about tiny mistakes in my math that give me a drastically different answer. If you have some time, and the question is worth enough, give any math you do a once-over, or even run the calculation a second time through to make sure you got it right.

For some studying strategies, the event pages on https://soinc.org and https://scioly.org/wiki are good to start, but definitely not as far as in-depth as you need for the competition (not sure about tryouts, kind of depends on your school). You can also look for resources and ask any event-specific questions you have on the event forums, they would be happy to have a bit more activity than they have had this year.

Best of luck this year!

[kellyjelly]

Ok, thanks for the advice! Best of luck in the future!