Rustin B-Div Invitational

[rfscoach]

7:30 pm est

[GoldenKnight1]

AA Award Ceremony

AAA Award Ceremony

[Godspeed]

Hi all,
JC (sciolyperson1), PettyWap, and I wrote the Road Scholar test for Rustin Invitational!
Here's the Exam and Key for the event.

Histogram:


Raw Scores:


Stats:
High score: 521/1000 (52.1%)
Average: 190.39 (19.0%)
Median: 158 (15.8%)
STDev: 118.9 (11.9%)

Question Analysis:
Section 1 - Highway Maps, Digital Maps, and Satellite Imagery
We decided to use Google Maps for this section, as an experiment - although this was slightly out of the rules, we felt as if this was the best substitute for highway maps, and we were pleasantly surprised that there were a very high percentage of solves for a lot of questions.
Average: 110/300

Section 2 - Topographic Maps
This section was relatively easy, but not many teams attempted questions in this section. Shoutout to Jeffrey Trail for being the only team to solve Q64, which asked you to compute the exact area between three points on a map.
Average: 45/300

Section 3 - Short Answer
This section was meant to be one of the most difficult sections on the test. Not many teams solved any questions on this portion, and even fewer earned points here.

Part A was route numbering - teams were asked to assign route numbers to roads on a map, with their numbers blanked out. I'm surprised not many teams solved questions here, but teams likely just didn't have time to solve this section. High score: 42/48.

Part B was a section about different types of map projections. This was the only section where open-internet benefitted teams. High score: 44/52.

Part C was about orthodromic distances, and it was by far the most difficult short answer section on the test. This section walked through deriving the formula for computing great-circle distances, and asked teams to compute the distance between two points on a globe, given their latitude and longitude. No one earned any points on questions 90-95, other than one team, which earned 2/18 on one question. High score: 18/100.

Short answer questions are definitely something that I want to do more in the future - it's far easier to do short answer questions online, and it tests the competitor's knowledge about the topics, rather than the mindless questions that Road Scholar usually consists of. Average: 7/200.

Section 4/5 - Map Drawing and Topographic Profile
I definitely don't think I'll be continuing this section in the future - only 31/109 submitted anything in this sections, but for those who did, an average of 84 points was earned. Average: 23/200.

Overall Thoughts
This test was definitely too long and too difficult. Traditionally, Road Scholar is an event about reading maps extremely fast - 100+ question tests should be possible for a handful of teams to fully score. However, online Road Scholar is definitely substantially more difficult than in-person Road Scholar. In the future, I might slightly decrease the length and difficulty, but I also want to make sure that when Science Olympiad becomes in-person again, teams should be able to use this test as a good resource.

However, the histogram and score distribution was exactly what I wanted! The test, although difficult, separated teams at the bottom pretty well. The top 10 teams had significantly higher scores than the rest of the teams.

Thank you to Mr. Suarez for hosting this tournament!