Socorro High 2021 Div. B Invitational

[Mr.Epithelium]

Calling New Mexico Teams!
This season, Socorro High School will be hosting the first invitational tournament in New Mexico Science Olympiad history.

Quick Info

• Date: January 9th, 2021
• Format: Mini SO, with events run in time blocks
• Divisions: Division B Only
• Teams: Tentative 30 team cap, with 2 teams per school
• Cost: $30 per team, to cover the cost of medals
• Supervisors: We will find all volunteers to run events, including Division B alumni and NM State Event Supervisors. Teams will not need to provide any volunteers.
• Website: https://sites.google.com/socorroschools.org/scioly/
• Scilympiad: https://scilympiad.com/nm-socorro/

Registration will officially open sometime this week, with priority given to New Mexico teams. The more teams we can get, the better, so spread the word!

If you have any questions, comments, and/or concerns, feel free to reply on this forum, PM me, or email us at scioly@socorroschools.org. Hope to "see" you there!

[RiverWalker88]

For anyone interested, we are still in need of event supervisors for the following events:

• Anatomy & Physiology
• Disease Detectives
• Food Science
• Machines
• Reach for the Stars
• Road Scholar

If you would like to write/run any of these events, we'd love to have you! Just send us an email (scioly@socorroschools.org) or PM me.

[RiverWalker88]

Tournament Logistics and Event Schedule have been released! Let me know if there's anything confusing or missing here, it's quite possible we missed a point.

[malikaow1004]

Thanks to everyone who competed at New Mexico's first ever invitational and online competition! I hope yesterday was fun and worth your time. We will be running awards today at 5PM MST at https://bit.ly/nm-socorro-awards, if you want to come see our medalists. Results, as well as blank exams/answer keys will be released in the upcoming days. Graded tests should also be released to teams in the upcoming days (given that I don't manage to break something in the process, I have an interesting way of doing just that...).

Again, thanks to all who competed, and good luck at awards!

Best,
RiverWalker88

[jaspattack]

I wrote the Heredity exam for this tournament! It was my first time writing Heredity, so I'm pleased to see that it went so well. However, the test was not without its faults. I realized while grading that some of the questions were vague, and I feel as though I should've dedicated more time to testing on Punnett squares and pedigrees. However, I got some good feedback and I plan on putting it to use next time I write. Not sure how much people care about distributions and histograms for this tournament, but I thought I'd share anyways.


The test should be uploaded with the rest of them in the coming days. Of course, if you have any questions about the test and its content feel free to send me a message! You can PM me on the forums, on Discord, or even just drop a message on my talk page on the wiki. I'm grateful that I had the opportunity to write, and I hope that I'll have the opportunity to do so again soon!

[BennyTheJett]

I was the Co-Writer of Dynamic Planet, with my partner in crime, Lumosityfan. I supervised the test, and we both contributed to grading. My Distributions are below:

Screenshot_2021-01-10 Untitled presentation(1).png

Screenshot_2021-01-10 Untitled presentation.png

Overall, I'd say the distributions are fairly good. Typically as a rule of thumb, when you write a test you should shoot for a linear distribution curve, and I was very pleasantly surprised to see how strong the correlation was. This was the 2nd tournament I've ever written (or co-written) Dynamic Planet for, so any feedback would be greatly appreciated! You can PM me on here, or find me on the Scioly Discord Server (scioly.org/chat). My Discord is BennyTheJett1.

Question Specific Review:
*Overall, most competitors struggled with the Ocean Observing Tools section. A great resource to learn more about some of the most common ocean observing tools is https://www.marinebio.net/marinescience ... anographer. I strongly encourage you to look at this and add this information to your notes, so you don't get tripped up next time!
*

Screenshot_2021-01-10 https scilympiad com(1).png

Most teams also struggled with this question. I was simply asking you to identify which ocean features corresponded with the numbers. You can also see a small bit of land in the lower left hand corner, which should key you in that we are close to a continent. This makes number 1 the continental shelf, or wide relatively flat and shallow bit of ocean right near the land. Number 2 is the slope, and we can determine this by looking at how close the contour lines are. In general, the closer the contour lines are to eachother, the steeper the grade (how steep the hill is that you're going up or down) is. Knowing that we're working with a continental margin, the answer for 2 is the slope. Number 3 is the continental rise, because it's a place where the ocean is still getting deeper, however at a much slower rate than the slope. Number 4 is flat again, which means we have gotten to the Abyssal Plain, or the standard depth of the ocean.
*Most teams also didn't get questions 78 and 79. In this one, I gave you a diagram of a Fjord-Type Estuary, and made you identify the estuary, and then explain what the "bump" was in the estuary. A great resource to learn the basics of the types of estuaries is http://mrsdmarine.weebly.com/types-of-e ... s website.

[RiverWalker88]

Hey everyone! This past Saturday, I was the Event Supervisor for Reach for the Stars!

I'm going to start by commenting that this test is fairly different from just about any other one I've seen. I focused very heavily on not only seeing that you could ID and answer evolutionary stage questions about the DSOs, I wanted to see that you understood what was really going on in them. Thus, the score distribution was naturally skewed a little lower. Now, for practice I did add some ID questions (11/85 questions and 30/280 points went to star/constellation ID, not including the Pollux questions, which had 2 more ID questions for 7 more points).

First, I would like to point out that I specifically designed this test for my interpretation of the rules--I did not design this test to be a mini-astro test (that isn't what Reach is, after all). I did a Part B, where I tested star & galaxy evolution through the use of the DSOs, and then a Part C to cover the interpretive tasks (I tacked Part A on because why not?).

Part A (Warm-Up) was there just for what it sounds like--to give you a chance to get your head in the game. It was 20 multiple choice that were pretty basic core knowledge (granted, I still did test things many didn't know), and then the 8 more ID marathon questions.

For the most part, in Part B (Stars & Deep Sky Objects) the first question of a DSO triplet was a trivia (or otherwise easier) question that was the easier of the three. I then tried to use the other two to ask questions that would get your gears turning for an answer. There are a number of them that did require a decent knowledge of the object, but some of them actually only required a decent understanding of some astronomy applied to the object. These wound up being some of the most difficult.

Part C was (unsurprisingly) the most difficult. I tried to stray away from calculation here, as the test was already getting a little too long for comfort and I didn't want to throw a whole bunch of ultra time-consuming questions on top of it all, so there's really only one question set there that requires calculation (although I did try to design it so that it covered all of the calculation). Otherwise, you were mostly given a scenario and one or more images, and then asked to draw a number of conclusions from that scenario and those images.

The score histogram and distribution are attached. The teams are a little too clustered at the top for total confidence, but otherwise I'm pleased with the distribution.

To say the least, I wrote what I thought was the ideal Reach for the Stars test, where I test your knowledge of star & galaxy evolution through the use of the DSOs as examples, and then several actual interpretive tasks. I was really satisfied with it, and I think it's my favorite test to date. I hope you all enjoyed an RFTS (RATS now, thanks Umaroth) test that was a little bit different from what's typical.

If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to email me (riverwalker088@gmail.com), PM me on the forums, or on the Scioly.org discord (scioly.org/chat).

The test will be published shortly with the rest of them. Enjoy it, I hope it'll be good practice!

Best,
RiverWalker88

Edit: Added questions/feedback line. Edit 2: Updated Figures

[ZachMUHS]

Hi everyone! I was the test writer for Crime Busters for this invitational. I didn't grade or supervise this event, but I checked over the grading to make sure it was fine and corrected things I didn't quite agree with. So first off, I would like to thank the people who helped supervise and grade this event for me, as well as everyone else who helped make this tournament possible. I would like to also especially thank RiverWalker88, one of the tournament directors who let me write for this invitational. In addition, I would like to also congratulate everyone that participated in this event! This must’ve been hard to do, especially in a time like this, but all of you still pulled through!

Thoughts
This was my first time writing for a tournament, so I was very pleased with how things went. This test was made to be a little more difficult, but not too difficult. As expected, there were also things I would’ve liked to do better. I would’ve liked to have been more clear on some questions, something I’ll try to keep in mind for next time. The analysis portion of the exam was the most difficult for me to re-grade because some teams would put things such as “powders found on him were also found at the scene,” instead of something such as “flour and sugar found on him were also found at the scene," along with labeling suspects as guilty however not labeling the other suspects as innocent. I was able to come up with something on how to grade this, but I wish I could’ve specified better what I was looking for in the analysis, so not as many students would include things like this in their answer. For general questions, I attempted to try and incorporate more critical thinking in some questions.

Overall, I think I could’ve done a better job at making this test a bit, as well as re-grading parts of the test, but I think I did ok in some areas. This was a great learning experience for me, and I’m grateful to the people that allowed this to happen!

Histogram and Scoring Distribution


Contact Info
The test and answer key will be released publicly soon. If you have any questions, concerns, or feedback about this test, please feel free to email me at azboy1910@gmail.com or PM me! I’ll do my best to answer everything and apologize if it takes a while.

Edit: Score and rank in the score distribution chart should be swapped.

[BennyTheJett]

Hi everyone! I was the test writer for Crime Busters for this invitational. I didn't grade or supervise this event, but I checked over the grading to make sure it was fine and corrected things I didn't quite agree with. So first off, I would like to thank the people who helped supervise and grade this event for me, as well as everyone else who helped make this tournament possible. I would like to also especially thank RiverWalker88, one of the tournament directors who let me write for this invitational. In addition, I would like to also congratulate everyone that participated in this event! This must’ve been hard to do, especially in a time like this, but all of you still pulled through!

Thoughts
This was my first time writing for a tournament, so I was very pleased with how things went. This test was made to be a little more difficult, but not too difficult. As expected, there were also things I would’ve liked to do better. I would’ve liked to have been more clear on some questions, something I’ll try to keep in mind for next time. The analysis portion of the exam was the most difficult for me to re-grade because some teams would put things such as “powders found on him were also found at the scene,” instead of something such as “flour and sugar found on him were also found at the scene," along with labeling suspects as guilty however not labeling the other suspects as innocent. I was able to come up with something on how to grade this, but I wish I could’ve specified better what I was looking for in the analysis, so not as many students would include things like this in their answer. For general questions, I attempted to try and incorporate more critical thinking in some questions.

Overall, I think I could’ve done a better job at making this test a bit, as well as re-grading parts of the test, but I think I did ok in some areas. This was a great learning experience for me, and I’m grateful to the people that allowed this to happen!

Histogram and Scoring Distribution


Contact Info
The test and answer key will be released publicly soon. If you have any questions, concerns, or feedback about this test, please feel free to email me at azboy1910@gmail.com or PM me! I’ll do my best to answer everything and apologize if it takes a while.

Nice job Azboy! The ice is broken!

[Lei0]

The exams, answer keys, and any other documents for the Socorro High Invitational can be found here.

Huge, huge thank-you to everyone who helped prepare, run and score events!!