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Not currently. Right now, it's one of the official events that counts for a team's score as much as the others. Theevents listed as trial events are open to anybody, or at least the alternates.

(wow when did you change you image?)

EASTstroudsburg13 wrote:Not currently. Right now, it's one of the official events that counts for a team's score as much as the others. Theevents listed as trial events are open to anybody, or at least the alternates.

why is that so!!!!
(rhetorical q)

so... is there a way to prepare for this event at all? for states?

Uh... no way to really prepare. There are some suggestions on soinc, sporcle.com offers some quizzes that could help you prepare under the science section; it's a good idea to memorize the periodic table or at least the elements that don't correspond to their symbols. We've gone into this before in this thread, and the [wiki][/wiki] offers some suggestions.

its true. you learn more stuff in 7th grade then you do out of college!

I see it in two perspectives.

If you think about it, scientists do have to have good physical ability. They run around in labs, they deliver stuff across entire campuses, etc.

In addition, scientists, as people in general, must have good health anyway as Humans. Who would believe an obese weight doctor?

That being said, I don't think we need a whole event towards it.

Well, we do get exercise running from one event to the next, especially on spread out campuses.

Any haters of this event need to grow up and realize that it actually is designed well, well-intentioned, and makes a nice bell curve when you look at the times afterwards.

I supervised Pentathlon at an Invitational yesterday (27 teams, if I recall...makes for a long day), and I grew a great appreciation for this fun and completely equitable event. For those that care, our challenges were...

-knock a birdie up ten times consecutively
-a putting green
-simple sac "race"
-putting a dome cone on your head, balancing a volleyball on it, and walking half of the distance of the sac race
-team: over and under hurdles

There should never be an SO test where everyone passes. Never. These challenges were actually pretty fair for different types of people. I felt bad for the nerds who have never held a racket in their life, but they made up for it by telling me that 100 degrees C is 212
degrees F in a couple seconds.
The best team of the day was the one who marveled us by nailing both the challenges and the questions, finishing less than three minutes. It was worthy of an applause, and these guys were not out of shape. It is a disgrace to smart people everywhere to say that nerds cannot be athletic or required to answer to their fitness, or lack thereof.
As for people out of shape or, possibly, a little heavier, the volleyball was fair. Small-headed girls half my height had too rounded of heads for it. Flatter, bigger heads had no problem.

In a dog-eat-dog world, only the best come up top. Survival of the fittest--quite literally. Mentally and physically. This is one of the best events in the B Division because it cannot be "cracked" by knowing the formula and simply studying hard. You and your team have to be well-rounded and ready for anything in order to succeed.

I don't disagree that it's bad to stereotype nerds as unathletic, but as EASTstroudsburg said,

EASTstroudsburg13 wrote:[This is] SCIENCE Olympiad. Not Sports Olympiad.

Yes, the academic parts are good. But the physical challenges aren't necessary. It's not that I don't appreciate them, it's just that this is a science competition, and I don't see where running with a volleyball on your head fits into this. I understand that it's a well-intentioned event, but I don't feel that it is really what Science Olympiad needs. People have said on this forum that their teams just pick the first four people who are available and have them go do Pentathlon. In the other events you have specialists, where everyone excels in a certain area. But here, you could take a team of the least-smart kids on your team, and if the conditions are right, it's possible they could win.

For those of you who seem to have a great dislike for pentathlon, you do have a right to voice your opinions,but if you notice, last year there was a forum called "The Society for the Discontinuatuion for the Pentathlon" If you guys have any complains then can you please post them on a forum like that? Instead, can we leave this forum for the discussion of the event and not personal opinions on whether this is a fair SO event?

Also for those wondering how to "study" for this event, like mentioned before, go over the periodic table but I also suggest doing this. Go over the basics such as scientists and their inventions/theories, commonly known acids/bases, knowing the order of classification (kingdom,phylum,class,order,family,genus,species), knowing some general info about planets, labeling plant and animal cells, the level of organization of living things (biosphere, ecosystem, community...), moon phases, general formulas(mass/density/volume, speed/distance/time, ...), waves, and etc. I know I left a lot of general science things out of that list but that was just to give y'all an idea of what they mean by "known general science info" Most of this info from above is from my personal experience and I hope this helps any confused person out there!!

hey i want pentathlon to stay around........but b/c i got a gold!!! lol