Poorly Run Event Stories

[EastStroudsburg13]

I went the the Little Tiger Invitational (as Community Middle School Red) and placed 2nd in Wright Stuff, 6th in WIDI, and... 25 in hovercraft? It turns out I should have gotten first (I'm pretty sure), because 5 out of 30 teams were disqualified (26,27,28,29,30) and 25th was first, 24th was second, 23rd was third, etc. Springhouse Middle School, who got 2nd overall, got 24 and 22 on their A and B teams, respectively. Our B team got 21st. Weird.

We didn't get dq'ed, we didn't get tiered, and everything went FINE!

If that's a score adjustment, you need to bring that to someone's attention ASAP. That's something that can easily be fixed, but you need to do it as soon after the results are posted as possible. Within 24 hours is usually fine, because that gives them time to provide finalized results.

EDIT: Just wanted to note, this actually happens relatively frequently, where the placings of an event need to be adjusted afterwards. As long as nothing about the event itself went wrong, it's not usually a big deal, and they can mail out medals to the teams that missed out on them.

[Zioly]

Many things were run poorly at the florida southeast regionals yesterday, but I think the way in which hovercraft was run takes the cake. First of all, they used the same test for div B and C meaning it was ridiculously easy, but even worse was the build portion. I go to the supervisor and ask for the target time and the response was "well in the rules, it says the target time is between 5 and 25 seconds, so just get between there and the computer will figure the rest out". Needless to say, the event was thrown out and no medals were awarded.

WOW! That is crazy! At an invitational I attended a week ago, the hovercraft ES wasn't able to secure a track until ~12:00, basically 4 hours after the competition had started. Additionally, when my partner and I sat down to take the test, the ES thought we were spectators (yes, she allowed spectators into the testing room) and didn't give us a test until we told her.

Also, for the past two invitationals I attended, ecology was run by the same ES. The tests were extremely easy, with my partner and I placing first at both invitationals, but what really took the cake was the fact that there were very obvious inaccuracies in the test. For one, the "correct" answer for the arrows of a food web we were supposed to draw were backwards, so any team that studied even a tiny bit got that question wrong. For another, apparently moving 10mph for one second, 20 mph for one second, 30 mph for one second, etc. etc., is exponential, while bank savings aren't!

[jiao_william]

Princeton Hydrogeo-- Not to hate it was there first year (?)

No part 2, only table and contaminants for part 3 and pretty much the whole test was contaminant based.

Hey, I'm Will, and I wrote the Hydrogeology test.
During the competition the Internet in many of the buildings shut down during Session 1, so a lot of the test was taken out. This was kept constant through all sessions.
Part 2 was completely removed, as it was completely online, and so were parts of Part 3. This unbalanced the test, and I'd
like to apologize for this error.

But I don't quite see what you mean for Part 3.
In Part 3, the points were distributed as follows:
20 points for Contaminant Identification
20 points for Remediation Table
27 points for Identifying remediation techniques
24 points for applying remediation techniques to the map (these were removed due to internet issues)
24 points for other misc. content

Of the 91 points remaining in part 3, less than half (40) were for contaminants and the remediation table.
There was also no mention of contaminants until Part 3, which is intended to be focused on contaminants and remediation according to the rules.
Part 3 (contaminants & remediation) is also a majority of the test (60%), so I'm a little confused on why giving contaminants and remediation a large role in the test is problematic.

Can you clarify what your complaints about the test are? I'd really like to improve my test-writing.

Thanks!
William

[EastStroudsburg13]

This is actually a good point to bring up; parts of Hydrogeo depend on Internet access to get to the URL, and internet access can be unreliable on some college campuses; as far as I can see, there is no contingency plan built into the rules to account for outages like this.

[SOnerd]

This is actually a good point to bring up; parts of Hydrogeo depend on Internet access to get to the URL, and internet access can be unreliable on some college campuses; as far as I can see, there is no contingency plan built into the rules to account for outages like this.

The only solution I can think of for that is the fact that there is a paper version of hydrogeology, but I'm not entirely sure how that would work for manipulating the simulation to answer certain questions in part 3.

[JasperKota]

Wright Stuff at regionals was pretty bad. The event supervisors insisted on handling the plane while measuring with a yardstick (I cringed inside when he started pinching the mylar), and misunderstood a vital part of the instructions. They read the parameters as "Plane must be less than 7.5 grams". I don't know if something was inaccurate with their scale, or my scale was just completely off, but my plane weighed to be 5 grams on their scale, and the rubber weighed to be .9 grams (with my scale it was 7.55, 1.49). As far as I know, we did not receive the room parameters ahead of time, which was frustrating because when we got there we realized the ceiling was much more crowded and lower than we had anticipated. They did allow test flights prior to the 8 minute period, though. There was poor communication during the period; they started the timer without letting us know, and in the middle of winding our second flight we were notified that we had five seconds left to finish winding.

I do hope it will be better run at states.

[sciduck]

Astro at MN state was the worst thing ever. I didn't even take it, but everyone knew how twisted it was.
Long story short, proctor was too lazy to write a test, so he stole rwayzataso's SSSS test. [I go to Wayzata by the way. And no, the proctor was not from our school.]
The ranks (obviously) got cancelled, but only after everyone took it. This was personally frustrating because Wayzata tends to do well in Astronomy, and I'm confident the two taking it could have placed well even with a test we didn't write. But what kind of proctor steals a test? Especially a publically available one? Written by a student that goes to a school in this state? Not only was this test written before the rules came out, so the DSOs weren't even up to date, but did it never occur that maybe people would have already taken this test? That people would spend lots of time studying, and that their effort is compromised once the event gets canceled?
Wind Power was pretty bad too, but I'm tired and and Astro was still hands down the worst.

[Unome]

Astro at MN state was the worst thing ever. I didn't even take it, but everyone knew how twisted it was.
Long story short, proctor was too lazy to write a test, so he stole rwayzataso's SSSS test. [I go to Wayzata by the way. And no, the proctor was not from our school.]
The ranks (obviously) got cancelled, but only after everyone took it. This was personally frustrating because Wayzata tends to do well in Astronomy, and I'm confident the two taking it could have placed well even with a test we didn't write. But what kind of proctor steals a test? Especially a publically available one? Written by a student that goes to a school in this state? Not only was this test written before the rules came out, so the DSOs weren't even up to date, but did it never occur that maybe people would have already taken this test? That people would spend lots of time studying, and that their effort is compromised once the event gets canceled?
Wind Power was pretty bad too, but I'm tired and and Astro was still hands down the worst.

...I've heard stories of people taking tests with questiosn they've written, but never an entire test.

(hey do you have the tournament results?)

[driedmango]

Dynamic Planet at regionals was a complete meme. The test was the exact same as the 2009 CyFalls earthquakes & volcanoes (which isn't even the right topic!!!) test off the wiki test exchange. Hydro was also pretty bad because they recycled last year's test, and changed part 2 but not part 3 so the part 3 questions didn't match up with the part 2 simulation...Also the same Astro test's been used for at least the past 5 years in a row so there's that too. I think our region is just super lazy.

[sciduck]

Astro at MN state was the worst thing ever. I didn't even take it, but everyone knew how twisted it was.
Long story short, proctor was too lazy to write a test, so he stole rwayzataso's SSSS test. [I go to Wayzata by the way. And no, the proctor was not from our school.]
The ranks (obviously) got cancelled, but only after everyone took it. This was personally frustrating because Wayzata tends to do well in Astronomy, and I'm confident the two taking it could have placed well even with a test we didn't write. But what kind of proctor steals a test? Especially a publically available one? Written by a student that goes to a school in this state? Not only was this test written before the rules came out, so the DSOs weren't even up to date, but did it never occur that maybe people would have already taken this test? That people would spend lots of time studying, and that their effort is compromised once the event gets canceled?
Wind Power was pretty bad too, but I'm tired and and Astro was still hands down the worst.

...I've heard stories of people taking tests with questiosn they've written, but never an entire test.

(hey do you have the tournament results?)

idk where this came from but it matched the awards