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Anyone have weird or funny stories about bad events from tournaments? I'll start:
(Note: this forum is meant to be a service to first time proctors so they know what not to do.)

1) In 6th grade at my first invitational I was competing in CJAP, and there were about 15 other teams there. During the test, one guy dropped a test tube on the floor and then got thrown out. Then, one girl got disqualified because her goggles fogged up. She did not touch them or anything, but she was DQed. Afterwards, the event proctor apparently spilled iodine on a stack of tests while grading, and she decided to throw out those schools' tests. Including ours. So they only gave ribbons to 2 schools.

2) Pretty much anyone from Georgia will know about this. Last year at state, 5 events were thrown out because of cheating and bad proctoring. The guy who was supposed to run Entomology was in Australia because he forgot about the tournament, the guy in charge of Rotor Egg Drop forgot to turn in the scoresheet before he left to catch a flight, and there weren't enough kits for WIDI, so they kicked 5 builders out but let their partners write. Apparently, some of them communicated about what the model was, so they threw out the event and gave everyone a medal. Everyone. In both B and C.

3) At an invitational this year, the Forensics proctor did not enforce goggles and aprons. There were also people in running shorts allowed to take the test.

4) At the same tournament, the Bungee Drop proctor allowed her daughter to obnoxiously run around in the testing area while people were prepping their cords. She did not enforce the 1 minute to prep, so this one school got 6 minutes to prep. (And if you were wondering their cord broke later on.)

Aww... you got the State tournament fails before me...
As a side note, the majority of our team was convinced that the medals for every team in WIDI was probably a stalling mechanism, since Experimental Design took 2 hours past the beginning of the ceremony to finish grading (and it was the first event in the morning! )

I wasn't actually on the event, but I heard from my teammates that (at Southern California state competition) the proctors in Metric Mastery handed out measuring devices and told people not to use them. Most people then just eyeballed the measurements, so the proctors ended up having to cancel the event.

GoofyFoofer wrote:I wasn't actually on the event, but I heard from my teammates that (at Southern California state competition) the proctors in Metric Mastery handed out measuring devices and told people not to use them. Most people then just eyeballed the measurements, so the proctors ended up having to cancel the event.

Yeah, we had something similarly bad... at State, the proctor asked us to measure and estimate two of the stations in inches

At the state tournament in Washington last year, Bungee Drop was thrown out because the mass was reported as the number of pennies in the bottle. Some teams checked this mass on their own balances and found it exceeded the maximum allowed mass.

Scrambler was also thrown out because no terminal barrier was used and the distance was measured perpendicular to where the terminal barrier would have been. I was stressed about the event during the day, and before I went to test my vehicle and launcher we were informed that the event was thrown out so that was kind of cool.

Unome wrote:

GoofyFoofer wrote:I wasn't actually on the event, but I heard from my teammates that (at Southern California state competition) the proctors in Metric Mastery handed out measuring devices and told people not to use them. Most people then just eyeballed the measurements, so the proctors ended up having to cancel the event.

Yeah, we had something similarly bad... at State, the proctor asked us to measure and estimate two of the stations in inches

That's Metric Mastery, alright.

During road scholar, over 3 teams were 15 minutes late, and the event supervisor ate lays chips right next to me the entire event... Really loud

I don't remember which competition, but the proctor lost half of Water Quality's tests and thought that the remaining tests were all of it.

azuritemalachite- I also heard that Entomology at Chattahoochee was run really badly (something about asking for species)

Simple Machines at Minnesota State last year. The proctors didn't thoroughly read the rule sheet so that during the device testing, the weights they gave us had to be placed on the device. The rules explicitly stated that weights were attached to a flexible hoop. Once they realized that everyone had levers that needed a flexible hoop, they spent 30 minutes searching for string, delaying the event. I won by the way.