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zyzzyva98 wrote:Shortage of paper? This is a national tournament! There are scholarships on the line! These events MUST be better run.

Do you really care about the scholarships that much?

I wasn't there, I can't say. But I will say that the scholarships are worth money, and if you were giving away money, you'd want to make sure it was distributed fairly.

The problem wasn't that paper wasn't distributed evenly to teams...it was that there was not enough room in the designated spots on the paper that they gave us. Even then, that wasn't too big of a problem, because the back could be used. The bigger problem was that there were multiple things on the same piece of paper, so that you pretty much had to do one thing on each specific paper at a time.

eyeball138 wrote:The problem wasn't that paper wasn't distributed evenly to teams...it was that there was not enough room in the designated spots on the paper that they gave us. Even then, that wasn't too big of a problem, because the back could be used. The bigger problem was that there were multiple things on the same piece of paper, so that you pretty much had to do one thing on each specific paper at a time.

Last year they told us that the back could be used, but only reluctantly after saying about twelve times, "Well, just try to fit it in the space, okay?" In the end we have no idea if they ever read the backs of our papers, despite the fact that we clearly marked that our answers were continued on the back.

Another thing was that they didn't provide us with graph paper. What they gave us was the bottom...probably 3 inches of the sheet for the graph. I had never done any tests without graph paper, and especially with this little space. At least it was a bar graph.

just a question..
how long do you guys take in the beginning deciding on what the experiment should be?

quizbowl13 wrote:just a question..
how long do you guys take in the beginning deciding on what the experiment should be?

Well, in addition to the poor materials choice by the supervisors, the experiment was extremely difficult to quantify (in my opinion), so it took us a little while. We still managed to finish.

eta150 wrote:

quizbowl13 wrote:just a question..
how long do you guys take in the beginning deciding on what the experiment should be?

Well, in addition to the poor materials choice by the supervisors, the experiment was extremely difficult to quantify (in my opinion), so it took us a little while. We still managed to finish.

1-7 minutes top.

Edit: Depends on your teams efficiency and the materials.

Usually only a couple minutes. At nationals...longer. We had the same problem as eta, it took us a lot longer than usual to come up with a way to measure it in numbers.

quizbowl13 wrote:just a question..
how long do you guys take in the beginning deciding on what the experiment should be?

As little time as possible- typically under five minutes. We practice coming up with experiments not so much so we'll think of better ones as so we'll learn to agree with each other relatively quickly xD.