Scioly.org

Dear Teams,

We at the University of Michigan Science Olympiad are so excited to finally unveil our plans for the upcoming season.

We will be hosting an online miniSO tournament on Saturday, February 20th, 2021. We will hold a live broadcast awards ceremony on Sunday, February 21st, 2021 during the evening. Our schedule is forthcoming, but we will seek to match Michigan State and National event conflicts to the best of our abilities.

Our initial team caps will be set at 60 Division B teams and 60 Division C teams, but we may raise the caps depending on interest from teams. We will, as in years past, have an initial limit of two teams per school and automatically waitlist additional teams unless there is additional availability.

We will be running 20 scored Division C events and 19 scored Division B events, as well as 5 trial events in each division. Our full list of events is available at our website, umichscioly.org

We will be holding our tournament on the Scilympiad platform, but please pay close attention to our registration instructions, because they likely differ from other tournaments using that platform.

Registration will open October 1st at 5pm Eastern Time. Our registration process will involve a short Google form for pre-registration. Within a week, teams will receive confirmations along with invoices and any other requested materials for payment. At this time, they should register using the Scilympiad platform. We will provide a video tutorial walking through registration on Scilympiad. Teams who skip the pre-registration or who register on Scilympiad before receiving confirmation will be removed from the Scilympiad registration and will not be considered registered until they have proceeded according to our policies and received confirmation. The link to the pre-registration form will be emailed to all coaches on our mailing list (if you received this email, you will receive the form) and will also be available on our website as well as on our Scilympiad page.

Fees will be 40$ per team this year, and we are delighted to announce that as part of our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiative, we will be offering fee waivers for a limited number of qualifying teams, by application only. To indicate interest in applying for a fee waiver, there will be a question on the pre-registration form. Interested teams will then be sent a link to our waiver application. Qualifying teams include those in rural or low-income districts, teams whose students are largely underrepresented in STEM fields, and teams who have extenuating financial circumstances.

We also recognize that this year presents challenges for teams, and to help support teams (whether they attend our tournament or not), we will be releasing materials throughout the year to help students prepare for events. Keep an eye on our website for releases!
Please feel free to reach out with any questions -- we hope to “see” you at our tournament this year!

For any questions, please reach out to umichscioly@umich.edu, and please check out our website at https://www.umichscioly.org/ and our Scilympiad page at https://statescioly.org/umso.

Best,
The Board of the University of Michigan Science Olympiad

We have linked our preregistration forms below!

Please note that these forms will not officially open until 5 PM Eastern Time today (October 1st, 2020). Also, these forms and additional information regarding our invitational can be found on our website: https://www.umichscioly.org/registration-2021

Division B Preregistration: https://forms.gle/WtQym3rKsogvbn9r6
Division C Preregistration: https://forms.gle/Sh2GwfXw2Qvqz7hf9

Thank you, and Go Blue!

Best,
The Board of the University of Michigan Science Olympiad

Thank you to all the teams who competed at the 4th annual University of Michigan Science Olympiad Invitational! We are thrilled to have hosted our largest ever invitational this year, with 74 Division C teams and 61 Division B teams from 15 different states!

Our Awards Ceremony (B/C) will premiere tonight at 7:30 EST on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fBlSWsZud4. We hope you all are excited to watch!

For those who competed at our invitational, we would love to hear your thoughts below! Despite the few technological issues, we were really happy to see all of our wonderful teams in a virtual setting.

A final note: we hope to publicly release our exams sometime later this week! Look out for another post once they're available. Thanks!

Go Blue!

Sincerely,
The University of Michigan Science Olympiad

Top 10 teams in both divisions

div b
jeffrey trail ms
sierra vista black
miller black
smith ms gold
hamilton ms nuclear
meads mill ms gold
east ms red
clague ms
timberline ms
larson ms

div c
northville hs
pioneer hs
saline blue
munster white
troy (mi) black
troy athens red
huron hs gold
menomonie hs
dublin hs
south forsyth pico

Unofficial revised results, 76 was added to everyone's totals
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... edit#gid=0

Point totals at:
118
123
165
208
219

Team scores with accurate point totals are now updated on Scilympiad!

This change didn't affect any overall team rankings - it simply subtracted 76 points from every Division C team's score and 61 points from every Division B team's score.

Let's put some event reviews, just for funsies:

DP (4th): Very solid test. I loooove a good DP test, and this was definitely one of them. I'm slightly bummed that I didn't place higher, but that's because I made several dumb mistakes and really screwed myself a couple times. Oh well. Thanks for the fun time! 9/10

Fossils (4th): Placed higher than I should've. The test was just short enough I could solo most of it, so that was appreciated. Overall I was happy with the test. There were a couple questions where I had a difficult time interpreting exactly what was wanted for an answer, but I figured it out eventually (partly because I'm dumb). 8.5/10

GLM (10th): The test was very solid. I would have appreciated a couple three point problems on there rather than a lot of rock trivia, but that's just personal preference. Where I really have beef is with the key. There were several instances where I know for a fact I had a correct answer (a lot of the comparison questions), but it wasn't on the key, so I lost out on points there. It was very frustrating to review that test I must say. Otherwise it was a very well run event. 5/10 Edit: Mostly for me being triggered about it. The test was fine I guess.

WQ (27th): The struggle is real. Not sure what happened on my end here, as I just flat sucked. Good test, key was fine, no beef for that. I'm just apparently real bad at WQ, which is frankly unsurprising. I guess I know which event to work on next after getting Fossils solidified....... 7.5/10

Hey Guys!

I was one of the DP C test writers! Some stats if you care:

Max: 46.9%
Mean: 23.8%

Graphs

How we wrote it:
We wrote very traditionally - we split the test up based on the sections in the rules. On each section, we tried to make a mix of a few easy questions and 1-2 harder questions. Did we succeed? You tell us! The rules sections we didn't like? Didn't write them in the test. We smacked them in the story problem and called it a day.


Random Thoughts we had:
1) A shockingly high number of teams could not provide a definition of a greenhouse gas anywhere near an adequate level. Guys! It's important you know what they are!
2) Same thing with corals - what even are they? *Us pretending we are you*
3) We appreciated your funny stories - had us laughing the entire day!
4) Thanks for the feedback:)
5) Take a gander at our SOAPS test if you want something written in a totally different style, yet has the same difficulty level.
6) For all y'all who didn't compete: The scilympiad test was slightly different than the released document: for the most part, we converted some short answer to multiple choice.
7) We recognize that the test was excruciatingly long, but we hope you learned something from it!

Learn what a GHG is,
Your UMICH DP test writers

Does anybody know when the UMich tests and keys will be released? Thanks

reninkidney wrote: ↑March 17th, 2021, 1:29 pm Does anybody know when the UMich tests and keys will be released? Thanks

UMich tests and keys can be found at this link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... 5valGxZYrq.

The link can also be found on our website: https://www.umichscioly.org/resources-2021.

Thank you!