The University of Texas at Austin Invitational 2020

[DankMemes]

Hey all, we're going to ask everyone to pause test taking for the time being due to technical issues. For teams affected, we'll find a way to give them extra time to make up for their lost time. As a result, we will extend the end of testing period by at least an hour to 8:30 PM CDT. The google form tests (Fermi and WGYN) aren't affected, so those can still be taken at this time. Thanks for being patient with us; we really appreciate it.

[DankMemes]

We're now going to resume test taking. The issues should be ironed out; we will be releasing a "Common Issue" troubleshooting document with issues that we have identified preventing answers from saving/syncing and how they can be resolved. Affected teams will have time added back so they can finish their tests.

[sciolyperson1]

I've created an awards ranking spreadsheet here, and will be updating it during awards on Sunday evening.

http://bit.ly/ut-awards-sheet

Due to high traffic, please use one of the following link to randomly redirect yourself to any of the six awards sheets:
http://bit.ly/ut-awards-randomizer

(Google caps sheet viewing at ~90 viewers/sheet. Due to a high volume of traffic on the BEARSO sheet, people were unable to view the sheet completely live; Google redirected them to a "preview" of the sheet. By splitting an awards sheet into multiple sheets, it eases traffic and allows everyone to view the sheets in real time. These sheets are all updated in real time).

[sneepity]

1 - Kennedy Middle School A - B32 (CA)
2 - Jeffrey Trail Middle School Blue - B28 (CA)
3 - Beckendorff Junior High A - B06 (TX)
4 - Winston Churchill Middle School Gold - B70 (CA)
5 - Solon Middle School - B62 (OH)
6- Sierra Vista Middle School A - B59 (CA)

Kennedy: 29 points
JT: 35 points

http://bit.ly/ut-awards-randomizer for awards spreadsheet 250+ viewers just now

[jaggie34]

Congrats to everyone who competed! I'll be making a post about Circuit Lab shortly, so if you're interested look out for that!

[svph300]

Hi, all!

Thank you so much for competing at the 2020 UT Invitational! I hope you had a fun yet challenging competition day despite the online format. As the Anatomy and Physiology B/C Co-Event Supervisor, here are some of my observations from this invitational:

Division B Distribution

Division C Distribution

Common Mistakes:

1. Spelling Errors: These mistakes were present throughout the exam (more specifically for fill-in-the-blank questions). While event supervisors manually checked over your work, I highly recommend checking over spelling to prevent errors.
2. Not reading over directions: Throughout the exam, we implemented text boxes that contained instructions for each section. Such an example is "input the disease as listed on the rules." As a result of oversight, some teams inputted diseases that were not listed on the rules (ultimately leading to an incorrect answer). As mentioned, event supervisors manually checked over these sections. However, I highly recommend following the directions to increase your chances of earning points.
3. Not reading over provided answer choices: Some fill-in-the-blank questions listed the provided answer choices (poor vs. rich, for example). While some teams followed these provided answer choices, there were a few oversights for these questions. Although we looked over your answers, we recommend inputting answers as listed.

Hardest Sections:

The hardest sections (from my grading experience) are the questions based on MRIs and histology images. For future competitions (and future exams of mine), I highly recommend practicing with MRIs and histology images through flashcards (Quizlets or Anki) and perhaps creating a practice exam. These questions are fair game, and I will include them in future exams (hint hint!)

From an event supervisor's perspective, I may transition from some fill-in-the-blank questions to MC/multiple-select questions for future competitions to limit spelling errors and such oversights. However, I will not be removing fill-in-the-blank questions for my future exams. I hope this post helps you out, and I hope to "see" some of you in future competitions (UGASO, GGSO, DUSO, and SOAPS)!

Once again, great job to everyone (especially in the current circumstances and slight hiccups). A special congratulations to Kennedy Middle School A (Division B Champion) and Troy High School Black (Division C Champion). As always, please reach out to me for any questions, comments, or concerns. Best of luck in your future competitions, and stay safe!

Best wishes,

Sophia Velasco

[jaggie34]

1 - Troy High School Black - C116 (CA)
2 - Seven Lakes High School Orange - C100 (TX)
3 - Mason High School Green - C069 (OH)
(Mason Black probably here)
(Mason White probably here)
4 - Iolani School Artichokie - C057 (HI)
5 - American High School Blue - C004 (CA)
6 - West Windsor Plainsboro High School North - C118 (NJ)

We hit 78 + 72 + 48 + 72 + 74 + 69 viewers between the 6 sheets max is 80 per sheet rip

[jaggie34]

Circuit Lab
First off, I'd like to thank everyone for competing! I know that there were some technical difficulties that affected a couple of teams taking the exam, so I'd just like to apologize for that. Other than that, I feel the test went very well! I worked alongside Ryan Chhong, Roger Zhong, and Alvin Xu to write the exam for this tournament, with my main focus being on ensuring that the test would be difficult and long enough to maintain the integrity of the tournament, and based on the spread of results this was definitely achieved! Now onto the test itself. (My comments are more focused on Division C since those are the tests I looked at more in-depth, although this mostly applies to Divison B as well)

Breakdown
The test was comprised of about 60 multiple-choice, true/false, and multiple select questions and 25 fill-in-the-blank and calculation questions, with a skew towards the calculation questions in terms of points. The first thing I noticed when grading the tests was the number of questions left completely blank, particularly on the multiple-choice. The majority of teams filled out these questions but a surprising number were still left blank. The same was the case on the calculation question, although this makes more sense. Additionally, teams often did not include units when necessary. I was pleasantly surprised by how many teams were able to answer the final two op-amp questions! I think I'll need to make these harder for future exams, but the results on these questions were very impressive! Alternatively, teams had trouble with questions regarding dependent sources as well as some of the non-circuit calculation questions. Generally, I try to fit in at least a couple 'wacky' or more obscure calculations, so expect some more of that type of question in the future (I'm saving some of the good stuff for later in the season)! The score distribution was about expected, but the top teams were more impressive than I thought and were able to score over 200 of the 301 available points! Lastly, I'd just like to add that the top 3 Division B scores were extremely close, all being within 1 point of one another, so congratulations to those three teams for doing great! The score distribution and histogram for Division C can be seen below, with some of the stats.

If anyone has any questions, just DM me here and I'll try my best to answer them!

Mean: 91.1163
Q1: 62.67895
Median: 86.335
Q3: 114.4975
Standard Deviation: 41.86352132
High: 216.17

[sciolyperson1]

Some stats on the Awards Sheet:
(Times in EST)

The sheet was forwarded to coaches at 12:42 PM on the remind.


Clicks peaked at 9:45 with ~844 clicks during this time interval (on average 1 click/second). 9:45 was also when div C results ended .


Minute by minute histogram with clicks: peaked at 180 clicks at 9:51 (3 clicks/second), with 9:50 (2.02 clicks/second) right behind.
A preview of what it looked like at 9:51:

At peak, there were 413 viewers throughout the 6 sheets; one of the sheets hit 80 viewers and started to lag behind:

[axolotl]

Fossils B/C
Huge congratulations to everyone who attended UT Austin! Even with the frantic Discord chats and Scilympiad messaging over technology complications, we hope you all enjoyed the invitational and learned something new. I co-wrote Fossils with Ryan Anselm and also had many volunteers who helped us grade, here's another thank you to everyone who coordinated or contributed to this competition!

Our intentions in writing the test:
• We tried to include multiple new topics that the majority of teams had not seen or researched thoroughly so further research beyond the specific questions on our test could contribute to greater understanding of paleontology/fossils as a whole.
• The test was intended to be sufficiently long so no teams would finish, whether they took the test together or divided it.
• As former competitors, we avoided the most common format of identifying the fossils and answering 3-5 questions about it with facts pulled from Wikipedia. While this format does test the scope of a team's binder quality with the specimens on the list and ability to identify, we were looking for familiarity with the specimens, exploration of other fossils-related topics, and ability to draw conclusions from given information and observations.
• In the context of the competition, we aimed to achieve a desirable score distribution which substantially separated high-ranking teams and didn't rely heavily on tiebreakers for clear placings.

Some reflections on the competition:
It was the first time supervising an event for the both of us so there is significant room for growth. This section mainly echoes Sophia's, as many teams neglected to spell scientific names correctly or read instructions for input. Specifically, the introduction asked that no taxon denominations (family, genus, etc.) be included in any of the answers. We formatted the test to have primarily fill-in-the-blank with some true/false and multiple answers and kept the stations format just for mental organization; for the most part, we will stay with this format but may alter the layout of stations for greater ease of access. Very few teams got the math problems on Station 5 right, most likely due to time constraints, but if we can find a way to ask them without allowing for a calculator they will be present on future tests. We hope everyone appreciated the memes scattered throughout the test! If they were insufficient, join Paleontology Coproliteposting for your daily dose of wholesome mammoth cube and opabinia memes. Feel free to contact me or Ryan if you have any questions as graded tests become available.

Finally, the top 2 Division C teams were close enough to warrant multiple regrades at less than 5 points apart (great job to WWPN and Troy!) and the rest of the results are in histograms and statistics as follows:

Division B
Total Questions: 199
Total Points: 266
Mean: 42.2554
Mean%: 15.8855
St. Dev: 27.3872

Division C
Total Questions: 214
Total Points: 323
Mean: 56.8669
Mean%: 17.6059
St. Dev: 31.1758

A pie chart Ryan felt like making: The Objectively Coolest Fossil