Scioly.org

Has anyone found a website that states the EPA requirements for the specific water quality tests? For example, sewage effluent can't go over ____ ppm of nitrates or drinking water can't have over _____ ppm of nitrates.

I'm not sure about the sewage number, but I believe that amount of drinking water can't contain more than 10 ppm of nitrates.
Below is a link that I found helpful when I did this event.
http://water.epa.gov/drink/contaminants ... itrate.cfm
Best of luck!

Godlike wrote:Has anyone found a website that states the EPA requirements for the specific water quality tests? For example, sewage effluent can't go over ____ ppm of nitrates or drinking water can't have over _____ ppm of nitrates.

Here is the EPA's page listing the Maximum Contaminate Level for a lot of stuff:

http://water.epa.gov/drink/contaminants/

magicalforest wrote:Macroinvertebrates were part of last year's rules and are removed from this year's rules. You are technically not required to know them. There was even an official rules clarification on soinc.org that replaced the "analyze and evaluate comparative macroinvertebrates" to "indicator organisms" in the rulesheet. So technically, you are only required to know the ecologies, life cycles, and ID of the organisms listed on your rule sheet.

That being said, sometimes state supervisors may use a previous year's rules and they may include the macroinvertebrates. But seeing you're from the state of Illinois, which I assume has a well-organized SO program (it hosted nationals before) I don't think you'll have to worry about that.

I wish that was true (that Illinois would have a good test), but our state test had nothing from this year on new stuff. No coral reefs or indicator species. It had macroinvertebrates and the water quality index on it instead, and half the test had to be thrown out due to arbitration. It was kind of an insult, actually, because we spent all year studying and that was what we got. I hope the Nationals test will be better...

Did the committee post an official list for the invasive species we have to know? There is a list on the Wiki, but I am unsure where that came from. Can someone confirm it?

I put that list on the wiki, because before I edited the wiki it was still on last year's material. I took the the list from the official list given to all of the coaches at the coaches meeting at the beginning of the year. You can trust the list, believe me.

Did anyone else find the nationals test to be reeeaaaallllly hard? We got 46th (ouch ) but I'd like to see what some of the top teams thought of the test.

I don't know about the C test, but our B team (HeavyHitter406) thought that the test was not enough of a challenge and I feel that when tests are easy, then rankings are determined too much by tiebreakers.

AJTheGreat1729 wrote:I don't know about the C test, but our B team (HeavyHitter406) thought that the test was not enough of a challenge and I feel that when tests are easy, then rankings are determined too much by tiebreakers.

I definitely felt the same of the division b test. The test was really easy, except for some that were just more of a interpretation problem. My partner and I probably overthought some of those (hence 7th place) but we still did decently. I definitely would've wanted a more difficult test, with more in depth analysis and possibly some short answers.

mk3966 wrote:Did anyone else find the nationals test to be reeeaaaallllly hard? We got 46th (ouch ) but I'd like to see what some of the top teams thought of the test.

My partner and I thought it was okay, not really expecting to finish 2nd, but still really relevant. I know we got pretty much all but maybe one of the indicator organism information questions. Then on the part 3 information, I missed both BOD calculation questions . I mixed up what was supposed to divide the final and initial and the number that was multiplying it. The rest of part 3 was okay, probably missed a few more. Salinometer went well and so did the tiebreaker questions besides the grouper shaking its head (I had an idea though). Then the part 1 questions were really weird especially after the first station. We didn't know maybe 1/3 of the fill in the blank. The estuary matching thing was pretty weird too, but we must have figured it out. I was preparing for a pretty hard test since the last 2 years, the division C test has been hard. After we finished the test, I was just hoping we failed less than everyone else. It was probably the hardest WQ test I've ever taken as you really needed to research the organisms and really understand parts 1 and 3. I wish WQ was staying.