gneissisnice wrote:The eastern Long Island regional is usually run well, though the events are not nearly at the same difficulty as states. One thing that could be better is the wait for the award ceremony. It generally begins an hour later than its supposed to, which is bad.
Wow, I wish you could be in the scorer's room at West Point during that hour.
Sorry you have to wait, but we have to make sure that everything is PERFECT. What do you imagine might happen if we awarded a medal to the wrong team, gave a trophy to a team that hadn't placed correctly, or worst- if we announced the wrong teams for the nationals spots?
Back in 1996 at Georgia Tech for Nationals, the wrong team was announced as the winner, and the result was a VERY ugly lawsuit by the team that should have won, with a countersuit by the team that was announced as a winner. So you can imagine why we have to be perfect.
So what's going on in there?
- Each event director has to score his or her events. This means they have to grade any tests, and possibly determine tiebreakers. If the ties can be broken using the published quantitative tiebreakers, great! But sometimes they go down to the last subjective tiebreaker and we have to carefully "rack and stack" the tied teams.
- Then, each director hand carries the scores to the scorer's room. They have to do something called "score counseling", where an independent judge asks a checklist of questions to make sure the event was scored fairly and correctly. This takes about 15 minutes an event.
- Next, each event's scores are hand entered into a spreadsheet. If there are forty or fifty teams such as at NY States, you can imagine this could take a while.
- After that, the event directors have to fill out a slip of paper that lists which team is getting each medal. These are alphabetized, and sealed until the awards ceremony. Meanwhile, judges and volunteers have also filled out ballots for side awards such as the "spirit award", "best team room", "most improved", etc. Again, these have to be tabulated.
- Meanwhile, someone has to go around and inspect each team room. If the room is still dirty, penalties get assessed or a team has to come back and clean some more. These results are reported to the scorer's room, and at West Point, we can't start the awards ceremony until the Colonel gives us the thumbs up on the room inspections.
- Additionally, if there are event arbitration sessions still unresolved, these have to be concluded, and the implications on scoring taken into account. In some cases, an event which had previously reported scores may have to return all the way to step #1 to redo scoring.
- Finally, the awards ceremony starts.
So if you're only waiting one hour, be impressed at just how efficient the scorer's room is working!
and got all our events right when we needed them 
, oh well we still won ) because they just reached over everyones heads.
queistion does anyone else have anyone preform before the ceremony we do it's like the colleges old band made up of professors or somthing... 