Astronomy (14th): We unstacked, so being split from my usual partner meant I had to carry math, even though I'm a DSO person. That being said, I found all the math to be pretty manageable, and I mostly lost points because of sillies (e.g., using bolometric luminosity to calculate distance when the visible apparent magnitude is given, forgetting that period is squared in Kepler's 3rd law, etc.
). I got through pretty much the entire math section too, so I definitely would have expected something harder, though I heard the DSO section was relatively hard. Good test nevetheless.Fossils (23rd): Apparently we were only like 12 points away from 7th, so it doesn't seem like the score distribution was that good. Despite that, I thought the test was pretty good and covered all the content well.
Geologic Mapping (4th): Test was wayyy too easy (my partner and I finished in around 32 minutes, and I heard many other teams finished in around that amount of time). The test was fairly long (112 questions), but mostly easy multiple choice. Like Fossils, the score distribution was not great from what I could gather.
Protein Modeling (14th): Not much to say about this, was a pretty good test in my opinion. No major complaints.
Overall (8th/7th superscored): I guess I was a little disappointed overall, mostly because Designer Genes had to be trialed. The Scilympiad issues during Block 1 and the Onshape issues were pretty unfortunate, but not much could have been done about those.
I guess the main takeaway from the results is that NJ
IS OFFICIALLY THE MOST COMPETITIVE STATE IN THE COUNTRY.
