Science Olympiad at Penn Invitational 2020

[nicksalanitri]

Fossils(1): Test was way too easy and short as everyone was saying. Not enough questions for a test to have a "break" station to go back and finish everything. Scores were definitely way too close and I would not be surprised if 15th place was less than 4 points off our score. Overall was a little disappointed. 6/10

5th to 15th was 4.5 pts

bruh what

what was the raw score for 5th?

No idea what my score was yet, have to wait for the tests to come in the mail, if you wanna find out you can pm me in like a week itll probably be in by then.

[Anomaly]

Event Reviews (im a little late though whoops)

Anatomy and Physiology (39): Code ran overtime and I also didn't remember which room number I needed to go to, so I walked around aimlessly and then found the room (it was right next to code smh me) and I got there 5 min late. My partner was having an even worse time though; she got to the building at 9:50 for the event at 10:00 and got so lost she didn't get into anat until like 10:15 ish. The test itself was so many pages and there weren't any page numbers which really screwed up with our efficiency. In addition, I kind of just didn't really study for this so like I expected this placement, my partner and I really gotta grind this out. Test itself was a little disorder heavy in my opinion, not having enough on other content. I liked the balance between multiple choice and free response though so that was nice. (the whole writing out the whole true/false thing threw me off a lil though lol) 7/10.

Designer Genes (35): I'm not gonna lie, despite not finishing I thought we'd do a lot better on this. I don't wanna sound super mean here but there was a huge division in work between my partner and I for this event, and some of the most basic inheritance questions were also messed up on her part so I guess there was a lil miscommunication going on during the test, so a lot of the first half of the test was wrong which in turned messed up the second half bc of the whole narrative thing. Didn't really like the narrative thing too much, it messed with lot of answers in my part of the test (second half) which relied on the first half being correct. Covered a wide variety of topics and at least the narrative was interesting though, 6/10.

Protein Modeling (18): Surprised I still did this well in this event, considering we didn't finish the test nor the jmol section but the prebuild brought us up? It's fortunate that they didn't seem to actually grade the fusion protein as any tournament based on national rules should have, because I had basically just scrunched up some paper in the morning glued it to each other and called that the fusion protein. I don't know why everyone's saying the Jmol was easy, I found it rather challenging and didn't know how to find some of the answers without background information, which I don't know if it was actually possible and im just dumb or if its not possible. so yeah that. I don't know about the test since I didn't do it, so 8/10.

Codebusters (3): LOL we didn't think we'd do this well with a pretty sucky timed of like 3:29 and leaving a pat, rsa, and two bacons left. I think what really boosted us to 3rd was the fact we got that second patristo that apparently like no one else seemed to get? so like yeah that was nice. Test was nice and long, glad to see it was better than last years (lol). Only complaint probably was that when we called time the guy looked super confused and didn't like realize we were raising our hand for our timed until 15 seconds later so rip 60 points we're never getting back, overall 9/10

Overall (25): Heh I thought we'd get closer to 40th and that we'd be lucky with just one medal, so my code medal along with a team PPP medal was a shock to us. Tournament was run well, first time that I was at a competition with such high competitiveness and I had a great time running around all day, seeing people and getting food with friends. Only thing that was annoying was the small little desks and the no writing on the tests but thats espected. 9/10

[jaggie34]

Scores are down, anyone know what might be changing?

[SluffAndRuff]

Scores are down, anyone know what might be changing?

Wright for us (TJHSST), dunno about anything else

[UPenn]

Hi everyone,

Thank you for attending our Penn Science Olympiad 2020 Invitational and for commenting on this forum! We read every single comment here and make note of them in preparation for next year's tournament. We have published the final tournament results on Avogadro. You may find them here:

https://app.avogadro.ws/invitational/un ... ylvania-c/

With LOVE,
SOUP Executive Board

[builderguy135]

Previous (Final)
1. Boca (1)
2. LASA (3)
3. Stevenson (2)
4. HSN (5)
5. Ward Melville (6)
6. TJHSST (4)
7. Lower Merion (8)
8. Rustin (9)
9. Columbia (7)
10. HSN2 (10)

8 out of the top 10 teams had scores affected enough for their overall placement to change. From before, one event was thrown out (gravity). From what I've heard from multiple teams, there were a lot of events that were graded wrong (not counting stations/questions or just completely misreading their score). Even build scores were affected, such as TJHSST's Wright Stuff placement. Not sure how so many mistakes can happen to be honest, but hopefully SOUP improves this for next year.

[UPenn]

Previous (Final)
1. Boca (1)
2. LASA (3)
3. Stevenson (2)
4. HSN (5)
5. Ward Melville (6)
6. TJHSST (4)
7. Lower Merion (8)
8. Rustin (9)
9. Columbia (7)
10. HSN2 (10)

8 out of the top 10 teams had scores affected enough for their overall placement to change. From before, one event was thrown out (gravity). From what I've heard from multiple teams, there were a lot of events that were graded wrong (not counting stations/questions or just completely misreading their score). Even build scores were affected, such as TJHSST's Wright Stuff placement. Not sure how so many mistakes can happen to be honest, but hopefully SOUP improves this for next year.

Hello,

Thank you for bringing this up, we are continuously trying to improve our tournament every year. Our decision to release the revised scores reflects our ongoing efforts to bring the most accurate tournament results as possible.

Some disputes this year were due to rubric disputes and incorrect recording of build metrics. Most of the disputes, however, came from point summation errors. Given that this was our largest tournament to date, we were constrained in time in order to meet the awards ceremony deadline, and therefore did not properly review these scoring mistakes beforehand. For that, we are very sorry and will instate a review process to sum these scores properly in the future.

Of the other disputes that were posted, many of them reflected an inconsistency between our inputted score on Avogadro and what event supervisors had written on the scoring sheet. For many events, scores had to be altered/normalized to reflect Avogadro's maximum score limit, which did not affect school rankings. For those disputes, we did not make any changes in Avogadro, although it may have seemed as if we had made errors in grading.

As for Gravity Vehicle, the target distance was announced incorrectly before the tournament. The same error was made on both of our tracks. While we greatly appreciate the teams that have had to adapt to changing circumstances, demonstrating their agility, too many teams had already competed to rerun all the cars. Given the unequal conditions, it was thus under our event supervisors' best judgment that we still award medals for the event but drop the score for this event from the overall team rankings. We are extremely sorry for this mistake and appreciate competitors’ patience.

Although it may seem like there were many changes on rankings this year, there were a total of four ranking changes among all 57 competing teams. These four changes caused other team rankings to consequently shift, a reflection of how close scores were this year.

Regardless, we apologize for any inconvenience caused by the score changes and will do our best in the coming years to ensure that there are as few errors as possible. Teams (in the top 6 rankings) will also be mailed new trophies if their team placement improved as a result of the score changes, and we encourage more feedback on our tournament.

Thank you,
SOUP Executive Board

[builderguy135]

Previous (Final)
1. Boca (1)
2. LASA (3)
3. Stevenson (2)
4. HSN (5)
5. Ward Melville (6)
6. TJHSST (4)
7. Lower Merion (8)
8. Rustin (9)
9. Columbia (7)
10. HSN2 (10)

8 out of the top 10 teams had scores affected enough for their overall placement to change. From before, one event was thrown out (gravity). From what I've heard from multiple teams, there were a lot of events that were graded wrong (not counting stations/questions or just completely misreading their score). Even build scores were affected, such as TJHSST's Wright Stuff placement. Not sure how so many mistakes can happen to be honest, but hopefully SOUP improves this for next year.

Hello,

Thank you for bringing this up, we are continuously trying to improve our tournament every year. Our decision to release the revised scores reflects our ongoing efforts to bring the most accurate tournament results as possible.

Some disputes this year were due to rubric disputes and incorrect recording of build metrics. Most of the disputes, however, came from point summation errors. Given that this was our largest tournament to date, we were constrained in time in order to meet the awards ceremony deadline, and therefore did not properly review these scoring mistakes beforehand. For that, we are very sorry and will instate a review process to sum these scores properly in the future.

Of the other disputes that were posted, many of them reflected an inconsistency between our inputted score on Avogadro and what event supervisors had written on the scoring sheet. For many events, scores had to be altered/normalized to reflect Avogadro's maximum score limit, which did not affect school rankings. For those disputes, we did not make any changes in Avogadro, although it may have seemed as if we had made errors in grading.

As for Gravity Vehicle, the target distance was announced incorrectly before the tournament. The same error was made on both of our tracks. While we greatly appreciate the teams that have had to adapt to changing circumstances, demonstrating their agility, too many teams had already competed to rerun all the cars. Given the unequal conditions, it was thus under our event supervisors' best judgment that we still award medals for the event but drop the score for this event from the overall team rankings. We are extremely sorry for this mistake and appreciate competitors’ patience.

Although it may seem like there were many changes on rankings this year, there were a total of four ranking changes among all 57 competing teams. These four changes caused other team rankings to consequently shift, a reflection of how close scores were this year.

Regardless, we apologize for any inconvenience caused by the score changes and will do our best in the coming years to ensure that there are as few errors as possible. Teams (in the top 6 rankings) will also be mailed new trophies if their team placement improved as a result of the score changes, and we encourage more feedback on our tournament.

Thank you,
SOUP Executive Board

Thank you for responding! I apologize for making the situation seem worse than it is and I appreciate you guys for giving teams time to submit appeals and fix scores. The tournament overall was great (especially awards!)

[Giantpants]

It’s only a slight change, but I think it’s still worth noting. With a minor correction in Sounds of Music, Syosset High School has moved into 10th place from their previous 11th. Congrats to them!

[jonboyage]

Like I promised, here is the link to the astronomy exam and key for this year.

Feel free to send any questions to my email, yonny@sas.upenn.edu.

Note: I would like to clarify that me making my exam public is not a reflection of SOUP's current policy. I was granted special permission to release my test, partially because I am involved with the astro team that writes the nationals exam. You can find other publicly released astronomy exams written by fantastic test writers like Asher, PM, Adi, and many others.