Scioly.org

I would like to bring up a potential scoring error that may need some sort of code (using my state as an example):

Two years ago, at the 2017 Idaho State competition, no-shows were awarded n+1, where n is the number of competing teams in that event, as opposed to the number of competing teams overall. For instance, in Div. C that year, there were twelve teams overall, and six competed in Robot Arm (as an example). However, instead of awarding no-shows 13 points, no-shows received seven points in Robot Arm, and likewise for all other events. Fortunately, instances like this are in the past now, but how would one write this out on an Unosmium spreadsheet?

Tailsfan101 wrote:I would like to bring up a potential scoring error that may need some sort of code (using my state as an example):

Two years ago, at the 2017 Idaho State competition, no-shows were awarded n+1, where n is the number of competing teams in that event, as opposed to the number of competing teams overall. For instance, in Div. C that year, there were twelve teams overall, and six competed in Robot Arm (as an example). However, instead of awarding no-shows 13 points, no-shows received seven points in Robot Arm, and likewise for all other events. Fortunately, instances like this are in the past now, but how would one write this out on an Unosmium spreadsheet?

Hmm, this is a bit tricky. I think the most consistent way to deal with this is to treat it as a scoring error -- so in your example, instead of marking the no-shows as NS, we can just treat it as if they all placed 7th and then the tie was not broken. It's a scoring error in the sense that no-shows should have been awarded, but instead all those teams scored zero raw points in Robot Arm and thus all tied for last place.

(Side note: not breaking ties is surprisingly commonly, even at the State and Nats level, which is troubling because it ends up weighting the events unevenly in terms of points distributed per).

This way, we can avoid partially redefining what a no-show actually is and having to implement a new scoring system just for this scenario. On the other hand, partially redefining the point value of a NS/DQ/PO is something that may have to be done for Florida/Michigan States (see "Scoring Method") anyway, eventually...

Sometimes schools like to "unstack" their teams where they try to split them as equally as possible. Could you add in a feature that allows people to select multiple teams and combine the best scores for that total?

kman1234t wrote:Sometimes schools like to "unstack" their teams where they try to split them as equally as possible. Could you add in a feature that allows people to select multiple teams and combine the best scores for that total?

This is an interesting idea, and certainly something can be easier done programmatically now with SciolyFF than before (you don't have to worry about team name suffixes as you can just check for the same school name).

However, I don't think that Unosmium Results, or at least the results pages in their current form, is necessarily the place for this sort of stat. I would prefer to keep the the results pages to be the equivalent of a box score in order to better reflect a tournament's awards ceremony, and having such a feature in the main interface may be confusing to those new to Science Olympiad.

In the future I am considering adding different "views" of the results of the tournament (particularly for tournaments in Illinois and others that use subdivisions), in which case a "superscore" view could be a possibility.

Could a "school profile" like function be implemented - in which you can click on a school, and find out what invitationals they went to, their history, etc.?

sciolyperson1 wrote:Could a "school profile" like function be implemented - in which you can click on a school, and find out what invitationals they went to, their history, etc.?

That would be a very cool feature. Maybe their results as well.

TheCrazyChemist wrote:

sciolyperson1 wrote:Could a "school profile" like function be implemented - in which you can click on a school, and find out what invitationals they went to, their history, etc.?

That would be a very cool feature. Maybe their results as well.

See my earlier response to this feature request, near the end of this post. I've since discovered an alternative method to achieve this that uses a database instead of relying on the static site, but still have them on same domain. Accessing results and other history by team will end up being slower (and possibly data-limited per month) compared to accessing the results by tournament as they are now, but it should be tolerable. (Access speed on the tournament results in their current form will not be impacted.)

However, my work on this feature is going to take a lower priority compared to archiving more tournament results and working on the Unosmium Scoring application (similar to Ezra or Avogadro, but only focusing on scoring and whose output will be a SciolyFF file that can be easily added to Unosmium Results), as I believe those will have a wider impact for Science Olympiad community as a whole.

(Scioly.org probably being the subset of the community most interested in tracking team histories, but also not the majority, where most schools just want to see how well they did that tournament ).

sciolyperson1 wrote:Could a "school profile" like function be implemented - in which you can click on a school, and find out what invitationals they went to, their history, etc.?

It would be hard to do that manually and if you did that automatically how would you account for differences in spelling? (Ex. HSN vs. High School North vs. WWP HSN... You get the idea.)

builderguy135 wrote:

sciolyperson1 wrote:Could a "school profile" like function be implemented - in which you can click on a school, and find out what invitationals they went to, their history, etc.?

It would be hard to do that manually and if you did that automatically how would you account for differences in spelling? (Ex. HSN vs. High School North vs. WWP HSN... You get the idea.)

Actually, the differences in spelling are not much of a problem. If you'd notice in the SciolyFF files themselves, the full name of the school is always used (e.g "West Windsor-Plainsboro High School North"). The site then automatically makes some abbreviations when displaying, like "H.S." for "High School", but for longer school names, a manual abbreviation like "WW-P High School North" (which then gets shortened automatically to "WW-P H.S. North") can be used. Suffixes for multiple teams at one tournament like "B" and "Green" (e.g. Solon H.S. B) are also represented separately.

In any case, the full name of the school should be constant for every set of results. If anyone notices some inconsistency in the way a school is named, please let me know and it can be easily fixed (ty grep and sed).

RoboMarth wrote:

builderguy135 wrote:

sciolyperson1 wrote:Could a "school profile" like function be implemented - in which you can click on a school, and find out what invitationals they went to, their history, etc.?

It would be hard to do that manually and if you did that automatically how would you account for differences in spelling? (Ex. HSN vs. High School North vs. WWP HSN... You get the idea.)

Actually, the differences in spelling are not much of a problem. If you'd notice in the SciolyFF files themselves, the full name of the school is always used (e.g "West Windsor-Plainsboro High School North"). The site then automatically makes some abbreviations when displaying, like "H.S." for "High School", but for longer school names, a manual abbreviation like "WW-P High School North" (which then gets shortened automatically to "WW-P H.S. North") can be used. Suffixes for multiple teams at one tournament like "B" and "Green" (e.g. Solon H.S. B) are also represented separately.

In any case, the full name of the school should be constant for every set of results. If anyone notices some inconsistency in the way a school is named, please let me know and it can be easily fixed (ty grep and sed).

Interesting. How would different suffixes work at invitationals? Ex. Example MS Black/Example MS A/Example MS X/Example MS