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I heard about him- my team felt so bad.
Also, it wasn't on here, but my team found the event as a practice somewhere, and then used it to practice. Then they got the same one for nationals.

Oh god, that was horrible. And he was in charge of the observations.

Paradox21 wrote:

paleonaps95 wrote:Wasn't the National test for this event last year up on the internet? Any chance it will happen again?

The test never showed up, but people here on scioly explained what is was.

The 2009 C topic involved static electricity. You were given various fabrics and allowed to go at it.
The 2010 B topic was placing snacks in iodine.
The 2010 C topic involved resting heart rate and active heart rate. You were only allowed a stop watch and your own bodies.

The 2009 B topic was the same as the 2009 C topic, just for the record.

Really?
I'm losing faith in National Event Coordinators.

paleonaps95 wrote:Really?
I'm losing faith in National Event Coordinators.

The National competition is run by humans, just like all the other ones, and so there are almost as many failures of organization, event writers not turning in their events on time, and just badly written events as you'd expect at, say, a State tournament (in fact, in some ways I think the New York State tournament is run better than Nationals, but of course it's much easier to run, being much less elaborate and with fewer teams present).

We all complain about lousy National events- I'm just as guilty of it as everyone else; I've been complaining about the terrible Food Science event I did at Nationals in 8th grade since I got back to the team room after finishing it- but there's really not much any of us can do, so we more or less have to get used to it.

That being said, yeah, I feel like Experimental Design tends to have a lot more problems than some events. Maybe it's because its rules are somewhat more vague.

I understand that the national event is run by humans, but I think that using the same test for both divisions is pure, unadulterated laziness. As is using a practice event on the internet as the National test, but I've already brought that up. At the very least, the 2 divisions should have different tests.

I see no place where it was mentioned that both B and C divisions had the same test, and at nationals, the same test wasn't used for both divisions. And, even if the same test was used for both divisions, what would be so terrible? Considering that the supervisors at nationals (and at my state competition) are rarely the same for both B and C, I think it's very unlikely to happen.

According to Phenylethylamine, it was the same in Experimental Design for both of the divisions.

I apologize if I'm overlooking something, but all I see is where she said that 2009 B and C had the same topic. As far as I know, the same test has not been used for both B and C at nationals.

paleonaps95 wrote:According to Phenylethylamine, it was the same in Experimental Design for both of the divisions.

eyeball138 wrote:I apologize if I'm overlooking something, but all I see is where she said that 2009 B and C had the same topic. As far as I know, the same test has not been used for both B and C at nationals.

Eyeball is right. The topic was static electricity for both divisions, but the event itself was run along separate rubrics. The topic mostly doesn't determine the difficulty of an Experimental Design event; the rubric and strictness of scoring do.

In most events, using the same test- or even predominantly the same stations/sections- for both divisions is inexcusable, partly because the B and C teams from a given district might both be at Nationals and there's some possibility of one or the other obtaining an advantage because their related team had the event in an earlier timeslot and mentioned it, but more importantly because having a C event at a B level removes the advantage that more-prepared teams should have, and having a B event at a C level- while less heinous- still doesn't give all the teams the best chance to compete.
However, the vast majority of instances where this occurs- where the B event is used for the C competition, or vice versa- it's not out of laziness; every such substitution that I've heard about has been the result of an event missing for some reason. For example, at the Eastern Long Island Division B Regionals when I was in 8th grade, the guy who was supposed to write the Rocks & Minerals event never handed it in- so the coordinators had no choice but to use the C event that they had (as it turns out, the first place B team got a higher score on the event than any C team, but that's beside the point).

In any case, Experimental Design is an event where there's nothing wrong with choosing the same topic for both divisions (although certain topics might be a bit complex for Division B- such as some physics and chemistry-related subjects- and some might be a bit simplistic for Division C- such as the ubiquitous ball-and-ramp setup that everyone who does this event must have seen at least once), as long as the appropriate level of rubric is used for scoring.