How to fix olympiads biggest problem. (Or at least my biggest problem)

[cool hand luke]

I made myself have a 24 hour cooling off period after our state competition before I posted this. My first attempt was a flame fest and not constructive, and I hope this can actually generate ideas to help fix the issue.

I think Olympiad is an incredibly program, That's why I volunteer hundreds of hours a year and thousands of dollars to support it. That does not mean that it is perfect, and we should always be assessing ourselves and looking for ways to improve.

My biggest issue I have with Scioly, and the biggest weakness I see in the organization is STATE LEVEL event supervisors having absolutely no clue about the rules of there event. Second is that there doesn't seem to be any push to fix this.

For example, the optics competition at state was a complete joke. The rules clearly state the size of the mirrors to be used (5-8 cm). My kids and multiple others said they were way bigger than that. This killed our teams ability to compete because my kids had developed a system that would work great with any legal mirror, and they consistently got within 2 cm of the target, but when you gave them mirrors that much outside the rules our system wasn't useable.

Second I heard from my kids and 2 other teams that the event supervisor knocked over the mirror as they took off the cover, and then put the mirror back "in the general area" of where it was. Despite the rules explicitly stating they were not to touch the covers. what's even worse is that the event supervisor had illegal (though for a different reason) mirrors at the regional competition, and we called him on it and provided legal mirrors.

I'm a little shocked that this type of incompetence hasn't resulted in a fist fight. Maybe it has and I just haven't heard the story.

The real issue is it just totally deflates the kids. we all know the time it takes to be competitive, and when the people running it can't even be bothered to read the rules it just sucks the will to work out of them, or makes them think that all of Olympiad is run by morons.

So, what are some things that can be done to prevent this from happening or to correct it when it does and make sure it doesn't happen again?

[TheChiScientist]

From what I know the problem at these state competitions is finding ES's that can be competent at running the event. I believe that some of best ES's are Science Olympiad Alumni that have a background in the events. Problem is that these people are hard to find and in the end, you end up with Uni Students or professors who do not understand the events completely. I believe coaches in Div.B can be ES for Div. C and Div. C for Div. B thus you end up with people with an ok knowledge but still people without a strong background in the event. A solution to this would be to give ES's "certification" in their event by testing their knowledge of the rules but I think this takes up time and money that Science Olympiad doesn't have so yea... This is what I interpret from what I have experienced at least.

[knottingpurple]

From what I know the problem at these state competitions is finding ES's that can be competent at running the event. I believe that some of best ES's are Science Olympiad Alumni that have a background in the events. Problem is that these people are hard to find and in the end, you end up with Uni Students or professors who do not understand the events completely. I believe coaches in Div.B can be ES for Div. C and Div. C for Div. B thus you end up with people with an ok knowledge but still people without a strong background in the event. A solution to this would be to give ES's "certification" in their event by testing their knowledge of the rules but I think this takes up time and money that Science Olympiad doesn't have so yea... This is what I interpret from what I have experienced at least.

In our state at least, coaches ES for their own divisions as well? Maybe that doesn't happen other places? But I think all of these things - testing ES knowledge of their events, having tournaments have test-quality-verifiers who look over the tests beforehand, etc - rely on having plenty of willing volunteers well in advance. Our state was still trying to fill all ES positions, let alone back up volunteer positions, under a week before the tournament. I think the thing to do is to make it easier to volunteer, scheduling competitions to accommodate the most volunteers and possibly planning some form of transportation, etc. You can't get rid of ESes who run events as badly as the original poster described unless you have better people willing to take their place.

[Unome]

From what I know the problem at these state competitions is finding ES's that can be competent at running the event. I believe that some of best ES's are Science Olympiad Alumni that have a background in the events. Problem is that these people are hard to find and in the end, you end up with Uni Students or professors who do not understand the events completely. I believe coaches in Div.B can be ES for Div. C and Div. C for Div. B thus you end up with people with an ok knowledge but still people without a strong background in the event. A solution to this would be to give ES's "certification" in their event by testing their knowledge of the rules but I think this takes up time and money that Science Olympiad doesn't have so yea... This is what I interpret from what I have experienced at least.

In our state at least, coaches ES for their own divisions as well? Maybe that doesn't happen other places? But I think all of these things - testing ES knowledge of their events, having tournaments have test-quality-verifiers who look over the tests beforehand, etc - rely on having plenty of willing volunteers well in advance. Our state was still trying to fill all ES positions, let alone back up volunteer positions, under a week before the tournament. I think the thing to do is to make it easier to volunteer, scheduling competitions to accommodate the most volunteers and possibly planning some form of transportation, etc. You can't get rid of ESes who run events as badly as the original poster described unless you have better people willing to take their place.

Coaches as ESes at official tournaments that their teams are competing at varies. It's very uncommon in Georgia, though it probably does happen occasionally. Ultimately the only thing that will improve quality is more qualified people willing to run events (emphasis on plural, at most regionals and many state competitions it wouldn't take that much for one person to run two or even three events, depending on the schedule).

[Skink]

I'll just drop a few disjointed responses here:

1. The best ESes are folks with enough background and passion for the program to produce a unique event experience. Their otherwise role in the program doesn't necessarily matter, but they need to meet those two criteria (and this is uncommon). For example, the university invites are talked up a lot here, but, looking at the released events on the Test Exchange, many of them aren't very good (and, at times, run contrary to the objectives of the program). Obviously, this is a lesser problem than not following the rules, but it's worth mentioning.

2. This has been discussed at length before, but what do you do as a tournament director when an ES accidentally doesn't follow the rules? Not ask them back or work with them? I reflexively lean towards the former but recognize that stuff happens. In other words, there is a lot of risk associated with assigning event supervisors. At the State level, if you don't trust somebody and they have no experience, it's a tough sell.

3. Folks locally have a cow over the thought of one person supervising multiple events. Even same event, different division, is tricky for a lot of them because of scoring. At invitationals, it's doable but nutty. Years ago, I did two back-to-back at a big one and sort of held up awards (and that's working nonstop without breaks). This season, I did two back-to-back at a smaller invite and had all scores in at a reasonable time. It just depends; I guess.

4. When folks have a major problem with how an event was run, they best volunteer themselves. You can change the system from the inside.

5. There is a solution to this: the arbitration process. It doesn't resolve the bad ES problem I noted in #1 but can resolve the problem noted in the first post, at least as a reactionary measure.

[Unome]

For example, the university invites are talked up a lot here, but, looking at the released events on the Test Exchange, many of them aren't very good (and, at times, run contrary to the objectives of the program).

While I agree that many tests from university-run invites aren't as good as people say (being in the same state as what's possibly the worst university-run invite in the nation in terms of test quality), the Test Exchange is not a representative sample. Other than 2017 Princeton, which still probably wasn't as good in their first year, tournaments like Yale and Gopher are definitely on the lower end in quality among university-run invites. Then again, there are definitely tests at higher-level invitationals like MIT that also miss the point of the event (2017 MIT Remote Sensing comes to mind, and the Princeton Astronomy tests could qualify since some of the questions are totally unrelated to the topic).

Folks locally have a cow over the thought of one person supervising multiple events. Even same event, different division, is tricky for a lot of them because of scoring. At invitationals, it's doable but nutty. Years ago, I did two back-to-back at a big one and sort of held up awards (and that's working nonstop without breaks). This season, I did two back-to-back at a smaller invite and had all scores in at a reasonable time. It just depends; I guess.

Must be a local thing, and probably also depends on the tournament size. My only experience with this so far was at a regional tournament of 24 teams - being in the last three timeslots and overlapping, I definitely had to utilize assistants to grade one of the events and build my tests to account for that - though I did manage to finish on time. There haven't been regional or state tournaments in Georgia larger than 30 teams in nearly a decade, which probably has an influence.

[chalker]

So far this thread has some good comments and discussions. I just want to chime in on what I think is probably the KEY cause to these issues: a lack of available staff. As an example, here in Ohio (which in my humble opinion is one of the best run states due to our awesome state director), we try to start lining up event supervisors in the early fall (for a late April state tournament). As with most tournaments, we need 46+ event supervisors to cover all the events in both divisions. Every year, after months of working on this, we inevitably end up ~2 months out with some events still not having event supervisors lined up. This isn't due to a lack of effort on the state director's part.. it's due to the fact it's hard to convince someone to volunteer a significant amount of time to the program. It's not like we have a huge line of people knocking down our doors asking to be involved.. for the majority of the events we have to go convince someone to be involved. And this is in a State with one of the biggest Science Olympiad communities, 300+ teams, 8 regional tournaments, and 11 invitational tournaments.

I can only imagine that in many States the problem is even more severe, leaving many tournament directors with the choice of either not running an event at all, or using a volunteer event supervisor that might be not as attentive to all the event details, yet hopefully will still give all competitors a level playing field (albeit one that is consistently unfair to everyone). My challenge to anyone who is really motivated to try to address this issue is to figure out ways to help identify, engage, and incentivize great event supervisors at tournaments all across the nation.

[TheChiScientist]

I agree with this wholeheartedly. At times some invitationals can be held back by a few errors. mind you these normally have about 40ish teams. Then at state you have about 100! Minor problems can turn ugly fast and the main cause of these problems are inexperienced ES's. Not their fault entirely but it's mainly a lack of manpower. I hope to alleviate this issues as I will if possible help out the state tournaments once I am in Uni For now we must find a more efficient way of operations for these kind of major events.

[knottingpurple]

For example, the university invites are talked up a lot here, but, looking at the released events on the Test Exchange, many of them aren't very good (and, at times, run contrary to the objectives of the program).

While I agree that many tests from university-run invites aren't as good as people say (being in the same state as what's possibly the worst university-run invite in the nation in terms of test quality), the Test Exchange is not a representative sample. Other than 2017 Princeton, which still probably wasn't as good in their first year, tournaments like Yale and Gopher are definitely on the lower end in quality among university-run invites. Then again, there are definitely tests at higher-level invitationals like MIT that also miss the point of the event (2017 MIT Remote Sensing comes to mind, and the Princeton Astronomy tests could qualify since some of the questions are totally unrelated to the topic).

Folks locally have a cow over the thought of one person supervising multiple events. Even same event, different division, is tricky for a lot of them because of scoring. At invitationals, it's doable but nutty. Years ago, I did two back-to-back at a big one and sort of held up awards (and that's working nonstop without breaks). This season, I did two back-to-back at a smaller invite and had all scores in at a reasonable time. It just depends; I guess.

Must be a local thing, and probably also depends on the tournament size. My only experience with this so far was at a regional tournament of 24 teams - being in the last three timeslots and overlapping, I definitely had to utilize assistants to grade one of the events and build my tests to account for that - though I did manage to finish on time. There haven't been regional or state tournaments in Georgia larger than 30 teams in nearly a decade, which probably has an influence.

I'm confused - Unome, aren't you still in Div C? Invitationals I understand, plenty of current competitors also write events, but how can you run events at Regionals if you're still in Div C?

[Skink]

C divisioners have been known to supervise BC events at the Regional level, though there are very good reasons why this should not happen...