Nationals Event Discussion

[Unome]

The classic thread, to talk about what you thought of how the events you competed in were run.

[Umaroth]

This might be the first year I didn't hear of any test issues from my students. It's also the first year that the Ecology test was not reused from a previous Nats to my knowledge! The events felt like they stepped it up this year. The one that stood out the most to me was the setup for Tower. They took a slow motion video of each team's device, and after the team finished, they showed teams their score and point of failure in the video.

[NEonGhOsT]

(pasted from the flight discord server)
I don't know where to put this but I think the people at nats also observed it, Helicopter was run really really poorly, I want to share my experience...

the first thing that was odd was the no trim allowed in the morning, I am sure many people were frustrated with this as the room was a complete and total mystery, nobody knew how the room would be like (I mean drifts, top slipperyness, and other things). It didnt end there, The event supervisors were not at all prepared to run the event, I'm sure they are very knowlegeble in free flight and have many ears of experience but for div C as they were checking people in they asked almost 0 questions to the teams they were checking in and didnt even check the boxes correctly, I saw a team in front of me with a helicopter having so many construction violations, it was, first of all over the box dimensions (the C event supervisors deemed it non teirable because it fit within the bigger 24x32x47 box parameters instead of the box which they had bought), secondly teams that had a top ceiling bumper without a complete disk (it broke off) were allowed to fly. the flight logs were also not checked for units and other parameters, upon a single glance they were deemed complete. I understand that the event supervisors were in a hurry to finish off but they completely disregarded the rules which was frustrating to watch as someone who watched and have been teired for those same violations. furthurmore when the competition actually started the judges and timers had no regard as to the flying helicopters and would walk around even as helicopters were flying. My helicopter as well as many others here is VERY VERY susceptible to drafts, a simple whoff of air can knock it off balence and as a result many flights were cut short. A lot of people blamed it on a "slippery ceiling" but as someonewho tested in such conditions I can testify that that wsnt the reason for the unexplicable drift, it was the people walking around and multiple helicopter in the air AT THE SAME TIME. Ive heard repots of at least 10 helicopters getting stuck. after my competition the C event supervisor was getting mad that I "had my things in the way" becasue she wanted to cordon off the space i was cleaning and when i was slowly claning up she forcefully took my things and handled them with little care and dropped them on the ground in an other spot. I was very very mad at this point but said nothing. NOBODY SHOULD BE TOUCING THE THINGS OF A COMPETITIOR ESPECIALLY THE EVENT SUPERVISOR AT THE NATIONAL TOURNAMENT WITHOUT EXPLICIT PERMISSION. this is completely unnacceptable. I said nothing as it was the last time I flew that year and my rubber stripper wasnt harmed but it is still unnaceptable regardless.

[Giantpants]

Some thoughts on Geologic Mapping - I'll discuss the sections I wrote and some general thoughts. As always, would recommend avoiding reading if you're planning to take the test for practice soon (for anyone reading this in future rotations).

Section C: This one largely went as I expected - solid scores at the lower levels, and relatively stronger results at the higher levels on this compared to most other sections (including one nearly-perfect score). It was nice to finally be able to write a mapping section focused more heavily on interpreting unit descriptions, as that's something I've been wanting to do but never found a good opportunity for in the past (Section D had a greater quantity of unit descriptions, but only for complete coverage of the mapped region, much less of it was actually used in the questions).
Section D: Nothing much to comment on here, good mix of scores and the cross-section worked out well in terms of having a range of difficulty of its aspects, so I'm pretty satisfied with it.
Section E: Strong scores here, I'm happy with the strength of analysis teams put forward for these questions and glad I was able to make that work out.
Section G: This is probably one of the biggest miscalculations I've made in the past several years - I expected this to be a medium to easier section, but it actually turned out to be by far the hardest, very clearly distinct from the rest in score distribution across at the middle to higher ranks (all other sections had around 2x percentages scored in those ranges, and even otherwise consistent-scoring teams did poorly here). In grading, it looked like a lot of teams had an understanding of the topic at an introductory level, but practically no one answered the bulk of the section, and I don't believe anyone made a serious attempt at the attitude calculation questions (even though it's just a three-sided form of a true dip calculation, and was worth 16 points). I'd definitely be curious to hear from anyone who competed. Was the stuff on higher flow regimes substantially harder than the rest of the content in that section? Were the point values too low to be worth solving? Did the math turn out to be too big of a single leap to conceptualize the geometry and system of equations?

Overall scores ranged from around 50% at the top to around 5% near the bottom. There's a significant damping effect from the poor results of Section G, which depressed these numbers by some 15% (of the raw scores) compared to the other sections. There was also a very noticeable falloff in scores at one point in the 20s ranks, where a 2-rank span dips by around 8% of the max. Considering all of this, I think that we were low on easier and especially middle-difficulty questions (an eternal challenge, but not one which I've missed like this before), and the jump in skill from MIT to Nats this year was noticeably less than the corresponding jump last year in my opinion, especially at the lower end, so we likely overtuned a bit in that region. Not my best work, but things could be a lot worse, we were still able to distinguish teams fairly effectively and I think most sections worked out well.

[Giantpants]

I had the honor of co-writing Geologic Mapping with Unome, so I'll go over some thoughts from my half of the test! Basically what he said, if you are taking it for practice in future years I recommend taking a look at this after finishing :)

Section A asked on interpreting foreland basin development using a stratigraphic column, and thinking about how we can interpret them geochronologically. Despite being the first section, it was definitely one of the harder ones (which I sort of expected haha). I hope this section presented the relatively standard inclusion of sequence stratigraphy in a new light.

Section B saw some higher scores, focusing this time on metamorphic rocks, and how they can be used to interpret a region's history. I guess I thought teams might do a little better on this one overall, but full credit on a section like this requires connecting a LOT of dots, so scores were totally reasonable imo.

Section F presented a geologic map from the northwestern United States that had both compressional and extensional elements. It had some easier questions but also definitely had what I thought were some of the hardest I wrote for this test. For example, one question discussed particular beds and how they interacted with faults, and one team in particular amazed me by getting full credit on it, which I didn't necessarily expect from anyone! So well done to them and to everyone, it was not intended to be easy but a lot of teams definitely rose to the challenge here.

Section H was a fold analysis using a stereonet and tracing paper (and probably the reason you're reading this post if you took the test at nationals haha). I was super excited to give out tracing paper for the real stereonet experience, since that's how online resources/textbooks often present them. At MIT, I didn't provide tracing paper, and though that was probably fine, I figured it would be a great thing to bring to nationals since they were highlighted a bit more in the rules this year. I hope everyone enjoyed what maybe was a new test taking experience for you!

In the first draft of the test, Section H was initially worth a less points, but we later figured it should be worth more given how long precisely plotting planes and lines can take, and we figured no one would do it if it wasn't worth a solid amount. This rebalancing of points turned out to be a big deal, since a lot of great performances in the event overall were helped by having a very solid stereonet section. No one full scored this section, but the top two teams for it got over 80%, which I was very impressed by! I hope everyone found it to be worth the points, and for the teams who utilized the tracing paper, that it was helpful and maybe, just maybe, even a little fun haha.

Overall, like Unome said, scores were a bit lower than we expected; perhaps due to us adjusting difficulty relative to MIT based on his prior experiences writing for Nationals. Like he said, writing good, middle difficulty questions is often the hardest part of test writing, and while we definitely had a good bit on here which we had considered middle, those ended up being closer to the hard end of the spectrum. I think this made for a test that, while not unapproachable and impossible, was definitely tough, and left a lot of competitors with a lot to think about afterwards. Even though Geologic Mapping isn't an event for 2026, I hope that curiosity persists, and that if your team decides to purchase the tests, that you review and feel inspired by all the geology that we presented. If you have questions about it, now or if someone is reading this in literally 10 years, I would love to answer them haha.

Congratulations to everyone on a great National tournament! I was so happy to be there to write for my favorite event, while also getting to meet and catch up with so many wonderful people. Hope to see everyone back next year!!