Event Supervisor Review
Hello everyone! My name is
Robert Lee and I was the
Astronomy co-ES (with
Pranit Mohnot), the
Fermi Questions co-ES (with
Yifan Lu), and the
Digital Structures ES. Thank you to all of the teams who competed (there were a lot of you)! This invitational was a blast to supervise for and I hope I can return next year.
Astronomy
Statistics:
Mean: 56.7 (28.4%)
Median: 53 (26.5%)
St. Dev.: 32.2
Max: 140 (70.0%)
Graphs:
- Astronomy_C-Distributions.png (40.99 KiB) Viewed 3365 times
More in-depth statistics and graphs pertaining to sections and specific questions can be found at
this link.
Thoughts:
This test was extremely rigorous, both in terms of length and difficulty. Pranit and I intended this test to have a wide variety of questions to make it as comprehensive as possible, with capstone investigative questions at the end of sections A and C (100% kudos to Pranit). As expected, the scores were low, relative to the points possible; however, we tried our best to sort sections in order of difficulty and I hope teams were able to work as far as they could in each section. More easy-medium difficulty questions would have better separated the teams, but I hope teams can use this test as a resource for future studying.
- Section A (General Knowledge) started with a few easy multiple choice questions and ramped up from there. Teams scored well in the multiple choice section and in the first two questions in the free response section. The last two questions were a lot trickier, with advanced topics of gravitational waves and stellar fusion. We hope teams learned something new!
- Section B (Deep-Sky Objects) was written by myself, Robert. I believe this was the best DSO section I've written all year and I hope teams liked it. I tried to change things up from the basic "ID object", "give a fact", "give another fact" sort of question and really test competitors on the value of the object (what discoveries it led to, the consequences of these discoveries, etc.). However, I did try to sprinkle in some freebie questions to reward those who did the research. The more conceptual questions like B4d, B6c-d, B7b-e were what set apart the strongest competitors (scoring above 40/60 pts. Congrats!).
- Section C (Calculations) was mostly written by Pranit, except for C8 (the Faber-Jackson question), which I wrote. Like section A, we started off with straight-forward multiple choice questions, moved on to the typical calculations (parallax, Stefan-Boltzmann, Hubble's law, etc.), and ended with the hardest questions C8 and C9. I was pleasantly surprised that many teams attempted C8 and many teams were able to score decently on it, with a few teams successfully completing the algebra for C8c. Finally, C9 was a monster of a question. Pranit wrote an amazing question that led you down the process Jocelyn Bell Burnell used to determine that pulsars were spinning neutron stars. Even if you didn't get to this question, I would highly recommend looking through it, because it's super interesting.
I would like to thank
Pranit Mohnot for carrying me and making this test amazing. Also, I would like to thank
Ben Zydney and
Dhruva Karkada for helping us grade (couldn't have done it without you two!).
Test Folder:
The exam and all other material can be found in
this folder. Currently, the solutions manual has not been added to the folder. We will be adding it within the week, with a comprehensive walkthrough of section C.
Fermi Questions
Statistics:
Mean: 88.5 (44.3%)
Median: 85 (42.5%)
St. Dev.: 21.4
Max: 137 (68.5%)
Graphs:
- Fermi_Questions_C-Distributions.png (41.1 KiB) Viewed 3365 times
More in-depth statistics and graphs pertaining to sections and specific questions can be found at
this link.
Thoughts:
This was my first time writing/ES-ing for Fermi Questions and I had a lot of fun. I found that teams liked the variety of questions (although we could have added a few astronomy-based questions). The test was 40 questions long, but perhaps a 60 question test could have separated teams better and introduced a wider variety of questions with 20+ easy-medium difficulty ones (just a thing to note for the future). I hope to continue writing for this event, so feedback is greatly appreciated!
Almost all of the credit must go to
Yifan, who wrote the vast majority of the questions along with doing the tiring task of grading all of the tests. Also, thank you to the 44 teams who took this test and keep this amazing event alive.
Test Folder:
The exam and all other material can be found in
this folder.
Digital Structures
Thoughts:
I don't have too much to say about this event, so I'm just leaving this here for completion sake. Just want to make a quick reminder that teams should pay attention to the parameters and make sure that they are not in violation of them. A few teams scored well, but were on the wrong side of the cutoff and were placed in Tier 2. That's pretty much it. Thanks to the teams who tried out this new trial event! (especially to the ones who did this event for their first time yesterday)
Test Feedback
If you have feedback for either test, feel free to leave it
here! I would appreciate it a ton, since feedback helps a lot with gauging what I need to adjust in my tests. The test codes are as follows:
- Astronomy: 2021SOAPS-AstronomyC-Carbon
- Fermi Questions: 2021SOAPS-FermiQuestionsC-Chess
If only I could come back to compete again...