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Name wrote: ↑February 23rd, 2020, 12:55 pm

sophisSyo wrote: ↑February 23rd, 2020, 12:09 pm we asked to work on the floor and everyone was confused

lmao, I don't understand why procters/other competitors find this so weird, especially in a auditorium like room with those tiny desks. It's so much easier to work on the ground with your partner and you dont have to balance binders/notes/test/other materials. I ended up working on the ground for two of my events, and I find it really helps.

That is a really good idea. Doing my 2 binder events on those tiny desks made it very difficult

Reviews:

Dynamic (11): I thought the test was very well made and had a great mix of easy and challenging questions! Because the tests were class copies, there was a bit of a mix-up when we were missing a page. Luckily my partner realized very quickly, and it was resolved without incident. I also appreciated having a visible timer throughout the test!

Geo (4): I was shocked by our placement in Geo because I thought the test was pretty challenging! The questions were very good, and I appreciated that they asked us to solve problems from all aspects of the event, including the oft neglected stereonet!

Ornithology (6): This was a great fast-paced test that I enjoyed! I thought that the stations were a little close together for the number of people in the room. Additionally, because the bird call was at one station instead of at the end, everyone in the room got to hear the call every time someone was at that station.

Protein (6): I did the Jmol exploration, and thought the test was very well put together. I appreciated that the section gave me plenty to work on during the event. I can't wait to learn from what I missed!

WIDI (2): I was the writer, and I personally love the type of build they used. It wasn't super confusing, but it was long. There was a bit of confusion in the hallway before the event was started, but after that, everything ran smoothly!

I had an amazing time at SOUP and want to thank the organizers and event supervisors for doing such a great job! Congratulations to Boca for the well-deserved win!

Molybon wrote: ↑February 23rd, 2020, 3:00 pm Additionally, because the bird call was at one station instead of at the end, everyone in the room got to hear the call every time someone was at that station.

Lol since we didn't start at that station I originally thought there was just some annoying bird outside...

Anyone know what some of the top efficiencies were for Boomilever?

Does anyone know what the ratios for Machines were? Or does anyone want to share theirs? I think we got 3.9 and .33.

Flyingfish wrote: ↑February 23rd, 2020, 7:51 pm Does anyone know what the ratios for Machines were? Or does anyone want to share theirs? I think we got 3.9 and .33.

We got about 4.2 and .31

Name wrote: ↑February 22nd, 2020, 7:54 pm reviews:

Astro (3): Fair but somewhat challenging DSO section, but very doable. I liked the less emphasis on ID and more on concepts. However the techniques or whatever we didnt know like any of. Math was a different story. We didn't finish it and idk about most of the math section, but the last 2 questions were extremely challenging. Very well written test, and I appreciate the time extension we got due to being late. Also anyone know the song they played? Because I didn't get to listen with our time extension. (10/10)

Code (1): Relatively standard time question that we solved 1:32 (? 1:30something), while lots of other teams solved 2-3 min in. The test was well done considering they didn't use toebes for some reason. The test was very challenging (we missed 2/3 patristo, 1 bacon, and one vignere) and possibly made errors elsewhere but idk. I think there might be only one team (?) who solved 2/3 patristos and I'm almost certain no team solved 3/3 patristos. My only complaint was the pollux (they might have left out a space or two? or maybe i screwed up), and the RSA which used bigish numbers and took my partner forever. Otherwise everything was ran well (9/10)

Fossils (8): Too easy, not enough questions, too much time for everything. They gave a break station after every 3 stations to go back, and 30 second to move over one table. Also I'm pretty sure at one station they gave a real otodus teeth as specimen B and a megalodon tooth as a specimen B picture and told us to ID. Would be a ok test at easier comps, but I expected more from SOUP (6.5/10)

Overall: There were definitely some issues with how things went- getting to events was a problem because basically everything was locked. They managed to get volunteers to do a good job opening doors but it was still a issue for some.
Also gravity vehicle was a issue. They had to throw it out after giving the wrong distance measurement.
I wouldn't quite say it was a poorly ran compitition, but for one of the biggest invites, it could've been ran much better. It was still a fun experience to come back here again after not coming last year. (8/10)

Congrats to Boca Raton for winning!

Astro guy here: Judging from your comment about time extension you were probably the last round in which we started with 2001 Space Odyssey theme and ended with a Remix by Ibrahim of Fly Me To The Moon

Oh and about the locks I’m sorry but it’s an administrative issue (only Penn students can open some doors plus remember we are smack in the middle of a city) that is practically impossible to get through

jaggie34 wrote: ↑February 23rd, 2020, 8:46 pm

Flyingfish wrote: ↑February 23rd, 2020, 7:51 pm Does anyone know what the ratios for Machines were? Or does anyone want to share theirs? I think we got 3.9 and .33.

We got about 4.2 and .31

I got 4.2.... and .3333333

Flyingfish wrote: ↑February 23rd, 2020, 7:51 pm Does anyone know what the ratios for Machines were? Or does anyone want to share theirs? I think we got 3.9 and .33.

We got 3.6 and 0.35. Reading these responses, I have a feeling we screwed up the former...

Hey guys!

I am the event supervisor for astronomy that wrote the test for this year's competition. I was also the ginger guy that very dramatically let you start the test by playing "Also Sprach Zarathustra," more well-known as the "beginning song to 2001 A Space Odyssey" (shout out to the Ward Melville team that got very excited to hear it). Just in case you were curious, I also played three different songs at the end of each time block instead of the hideous alarm you all are probably used to. The songs were, "So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish" from H2G2, "Rocket Man" by Elton John, and a rendition of "Fly Me to the Moon" by the YouTube channel Going Spaceward which I really like.

Anyways, let's get to the part you probably want to see. Since astro was in held in the first three timeblocks, we got done with grading fairly early and I was able to record what each team scored on every single question in a big messy excel spreadsheet. First of all, the overall score distribution:



The top score was 64 points out of a possible 125, or ~51%. The average was 33.2 points, or ~26.6%. You may have noticed that I added a trendline. It doesn't mean much in particular, I just thought it was interesting how, according to the linear fit, on average, each point gained meant you went up about one place. Also, it was very consistently linear, with an R^2 of 0.9889.

Next, the question breakdown.




At first glace, I noticed that 7 out of the 13 questions had at least one team get a perfect score on it. Also, the two toughest questions appeared to be q3 and q5 in section two, the math. q5 in particular was a challenge for most teams, as no team got even close to getting most of it correct. This is probably because it was the last question, was worth a lot of points, and was overall challenging. Also, the last part of q5 was worth 5 points, and no one answered it correctly let alone attempted it.

Overall, I am happy with the results. However, I think I could have made the test reward more points for a general understanding of astronomy while maintaining its difficulty and content. If you have questions about it, feel free to contact me here or email me at yonny@sas.upenn.edu and I will get back to you as soon as I can. I hope you all enjoyed it, it was certainly fun to supervise it this year, and hopefully I will see many of you again next year! I will be at nationals this year in the astro room (along with a few other familiar faces), so come by and say hi!

In addition, I will be publicly releasing my test on 3/1 here so make sure to look out for that. I believe I will be the only one from SOUP to do this.

And no, 80% of my test was not jmol.