Science Olympiad "Dynasties"

[winchesetr]

Just saw this article ( https://www.competitionsciences.org/201 ... mRjlzI0GYg ) that came out from the Institute of Competitive Sciences analyzing the top C Division teams from the past 20 years. The analysis is pretty cool - I definitely think that some of the teams are generally underrated in prediction contests for Nationals, and that overall team strength can be underestimated from invitational competitions.

I'm curious what other people's thoughts are on the article and the topic of "Dynasties" - are they fair to the competition? How do we engage more teams to compete when top teams win every year? What other analysis might be good (ex. public vs private vs. magnet schools and dynasties, school size and dynasties, etc)?

[Unome]

I like the use of four-year rankings, and I think the author accurately captured the power balance of teams during the time period. I do think the use of point scores may have improved the analysis though. Can't write much more from mobile unfortunately.

[Paleofreakazoid]

Four-year rankings are interesting, I'd be interested to see the results for three-year rankings as well! I know my school rarely if ever accepts any freshmen, so student life-cycles might be more accurately represented by a three-year ranking for our school. I know at least a couple other schools similarly don't have students participate in the most competitive team all four years.

[PioBoy]

Wow, surprised to see Grand Haven was that dominant....
Another thing that would be cool to look at would be how long parents/Coaches stay as part of the program. Did parents stay back after kids left? Are there always the same coaches...or do they cycle ever so often & how does that affect performance. It would be great to look at the effect! As far as engaging teams(you might not agree with me), even though the top three might always be one of a few dominant teams, the rest of the places are wide open.. It's still a great feeling to place top ten & top five. These "dynasties" can be beaten, after all, Centerville & Grand Haven did not make Nationals this year(2019).

[RoboMarth]

Throwback to this chart: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0Vye4 ... 1pZjg/view

Shameless plug, but if anyone wants to do a point score based analysis, some well-formatted data sets for Nats going back to 2013 are available for download here: https://unosmium.org/results/
(search 'nats div c' -> full results -> download icon)

[sciolyperson1]

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

Just thought that would be interesting as well (took a while to make lol). Div B teams seem a lot less dominant than Div C teams, but the model is very similar - one dominating school, and another 8 trailing after it. Between 9th and 10th, there's a fairly significant break - similar to the Div C break present between Div C's 7th and 8th places.

[Unome]

I'll do a point score analysis on Saturday or Sunday (tough to do something like that without an actual computer...). I've got some plans for how to handle some of the issues that come with point score analysis in my head right now.

[Unome]

Here's an analysis of Div C by four-year average point scores over the last 16 years (it uses scores from 2001, which is when the current low-score-wins system was implemented). As a heuristic, I used 1.25 times a team's nearest nationals score for the first two years' distance from a national qualification, and 600 as a baseline for the rest.



There's plenty to talk about, but I kind of want to sleep... the biggest takeaway is that Troy wasn't really scoring worse during their slump, just Solon and Centerville were scoring a lot better. Solon had three sub-200 scores in a row but poorer scores on either side, keeping them above 200 in the averages. Troy did indeed fall to fourth for one year in my analysis, as with the rank-based analysis in the article.

I'll do a similar one for Div B eventually, just need to get the data down.

[EastStroudsburg13]

It really is a blast from the past to remember just how dominant Ohio schools were in the early 2010s. California seems to be tougher overall nowadays, but back then Ohio was the unquestioned king, and it wasn't close. It's also a good reminder of just how good those Grand Haven teams were.

One thing I do wonder is if you were to drop 2012 Solon or 2010 Centerville into 2019 nationals, how they'd do. Teams are definitely better now than they used to, but those teams were on a different level. A good hypothetical to consider.

[nicholasmaurer]

It really is a blast from the past to remember just how dominant Ohio schools were in the early 2010s. California seems to be tougher overall nowadays, but back then Ohio was the unquestioned king, and it wasn't close. It's also a good reminder of just how good those Grand Haven teams were.

One thing I do wonder is if you were to drop 2012 Solon or 2010 Centerville into 2019 nationals, how they'd do. Teams are definitely better now than they used to, but those teams were on a different level. A good hypothetical to consider.

We’d win, hands down, not that I’m biased :p