Science Olympiad at MIT Invitational 2020

[Umaroth]

Watching our school's (T)LMMM meme appear on the awards ceremony slideshow was amazing.

Very high effort meme hehe, totally didn't take less than a minute

[SilverBreeze]

Watching our school's (T)LMMM meme appear on the awards ceremony slideshow was amazing.

Very high effort meme hehe, totally didn't take less than a minute

Thought it took an entire 3 minutes? Proper ordering of colors is very important, you know.

[pepperonipi]

Watching our school's (T)LMMM meme appear on the awards ceremony slideshow was amazing.

Very high effort meme hehe, totally didn't take less than a minute

Thought it took an entire 3 minutes? Proper ordering of colors is very important, you know.

Jeez Umaroth is totally undermining all of the hard work that went into that meme

[Umaroth]

Guys does anyone have the contact for the detector proctor, I lost a very important pouch of cables and I think it might have been left behind at detector.

[gz839918]

Does this mean other competitions that have used this scoresheet may have been impacted?

Sounds of music scores at the Duke Invitational were affected. (For your team, Lake Braddock, your raw score and medal remain the same.) The DUSO team released the correct ranks on January 19th. I discovered the same issue and left a post about it last week, but since the error resurfaced at MIT, in hindsight I certainly should have contacted SO Inc. and should have posted this information in more threads.

[smayya337]

Guys does anyone have the contact for the detector proctor, I lost a very important pouch of cables and I think it might have been left behind at detector.

Try messaging mjcox2000.

[dvegadvol]

Anyone know when MIT tests/keys will be released to the public?

Thanks

[primitivepolonium]

Howdy,

One of the Chem Lab supervisors here. We were really happy (and surprised) about how well everyone did, and it was great seeing all of you!

In this folder, you can find the exam and answer key. Also included are some data figures, the citric/carbonic acid score calculator, a feedback form, and some “Side B” questions for post-tournament practice. (Here’s a direct link to the feedback form: all feedback will be read and appreciated!)

Lab Portion
Last year, the lab was the last question and worth a very small portion of the exam. Our reasoning was that since it was meant to be such a fast lab, it shouldn’t be worth too many points. As a result, very few teams attempted the lab last year, and I pipetted out 80 vials of HCl for nothing.

This year, the lab portion was worth 70/200 (35%) of the entire exam. While it’s technically possible to place, it would be downright impossible to win without it. It’s also a really long lab. If you convert points to time, this lab is projected to take 35 minutes. It probably takes a bit longer than that, but you get the idea.

The high score on the lab question was 68.77 (98.2%). A handful of teams got perfect or near-perfect scores on citric/carbonic acid determination.

A few teams got upset that we didn’t provide any glassware, but as stated in 2b on the rules, teams are allowed to bring anything listed on the Recommended Lab Equipment List. Those that don’t bring these things will be at a disadvantage.

Written Portion
Original drafts of the written portion were shortened significantly, with the intent of allowing students to attempt every question. Performance was generally good, with a high score of 93.5 (71.9%).

Specific Questions and Funny Things
Someone claimed that “aqueous solutions do not always contain water.” Another team wrote a treatise about phlogiston. It was a good time.

A lot of competitors asked what our policy on sig figs was. We told everyone some variation of “Try your best”, because the real answer (at least for me) was, “If it’s not 1 sig fig, or 8 sig figs, I’ll probably take it.” But for real, y'all should learn your sig figs, because some Chem Lab answer keys specifically award points for correct sig figs.

#2: It was surprising how few people finished the unit conversions. It’s time consuming, but it’s also easy-ish if you know what the various concentration units are. If you can’t reliably do the other questions, these problems offer great payoff.

On 2.4, a lot of people got baited by“organic and biochemists believe this, so there must be some truth to it!” Two life lessons: biochemists don’t actually know chemistry, and always question appeals to ethos (throwback to AP Lang?). Just because a biochemist says the pKa of water is 15.7 doesn’t mean it’s true. It’s quite common for phony people to cite fancy-sounding credentials in an attempt to deny global warming or whatnot, so it’s important to think critically about claims and titles.

#5 is the classical titration problem. To my surprise, almost no one got the entirety of 5.5 correct. All the volumes of NaOH were selected to be “significant”: i isn’t a buffer (standard Ka = x^2/[concentration]), ii is an endpoint/equivalence point, and iii is a halfway point. The point of 5.4 was to calculate a “vol needed to reach endpoint” value so that it was easier to see that iii was a halfway point. Life hack: in buffer questions, always do a cursory check for endpoints/halfway points. When it comes to halfway points, half (no pun intended) of the work has already been done for you.

6.4 Many teams had some idea of why benzene and toluene form an ideal solution, but few of them took the time to explain why other pairs such as HCl/H2O don't. We were super impressed by how many teams cited "pi stacking" as an IMF shared by toluene and benzene.

Overall high score was 155.67/200 (78.5%). We were extremely pleased by the difficulty and length of the exam; it seemed just-right to us, and there weren't too many ties to break.

Edit: mandatory reminder that aqueous solutions as a topic effing suck. Physical properties are arguably too open-ended, but it's the topic I also feel the most comfortable writing for since there's so much out there.

[pb5754]

Event Reviews:

Astronomy (2): As always, this was a pretty solid test. I was responsible for the DSO section, which was definitely much easier than I anticipated although I guess it was sort of necessary given that Sections B and C seemed to be on the harder side. 9.5/10

Fossils (18): I went into the event expecting ~30th, then came out expecting ~10th, and finally got around 20th. Turns out we made a decent number of really dumb sillies and given that the test didn't seem super hard or anything (it would be nice to get some score distributions), this is probably what brought us down. Overall, however, the test seemed to be pretty well made although it probably could have been a bit more challenging. The station rotation scheme was very straightforward as well which was convenient. The only possible problem I had was that some stations were far easier than others and it would have been better if they were a bit more balanced (probably best done by making the easiest stations harder). 8/10

Geologic Mapping (4): I expected that there would be a multiple-choice section so I got thrown off guard when I saw that there wasn't any multiple choice. I'm pretty sure we didn't get anything done in the like the first 10 minutes although we managed to recover after that. A good test regardless. The only major annoyance was the writing on tests issue but I guess there wasn't much that could have been done about that. 9/10

Protein Modeling (10): Yeah so like I was responsible for the Jmol portion of the test and basically I tanked very hard. Interested to see what the scores were like. No real complaints though I guess. 9/10

Overall (7): The tournament was smoothly run and there really weren't any problems as far as I could tell. 10/10

[bromothymol]

Protein Modeling (10): Yeah so like I was responsible for the Jmol portion of the test and basically I tanked very hard. Interested to see what the scores were like. No real complaints though I guess. 9/10

when he does the jmol part