Yeah, the samples were pretty awesome.E Edgar wrote:Though this is slightly off topic, I would like to present my opinion about the fossils event last year at nationals.
I think that for the most part, the event was run very well.
Fossils is an event where it becomes extremely difficult to differentiate between competitors once you get to a certain level since at that point, there are several people that have such good binders that they can easily look up the answer to any question they don't already know. By giving masses of questions, and therefore no time to look in binders, the nationals test basically boiled down to whoever knew the most did the best. With fewer questions, I think there either would have been a few perfects at the top or it would've come down to who made the fewest trivial mistakes or wrote the most on tiebreaker questions.
Note that I am not arguing for the abolition of binders since no doubt they were very useful in differentiating between those in the middle of the pack.
Anyway, no one can argue that the fossil samples weren't positively amazing.
I only wish I had more time to look at them.
When I said the event was unfair, it was really only for a couple of reasons.
1)No time warning. For the first two stations, I got messed up because I thought "hey, six minutes is plenty, I'll be fine", so I worked methodically, taking my time. But halfway through the station, I hear "times up, move to the next station". I think a "2 minutes remaining" or "1 minute remaining" would have been nice. I suppose all the teams had the same disadvantage though.
2) Some things werent on the list. The echinoderm station, there were at least 3 things that we didnt have to know (one of them was something like holothoidea, it was not on the list). Also, there were more coral specimens that we had to ID than were on the list, meaning there were either repeats, or things we didnt have to know.
3)The amount of specimens in some stations were rather ridiculous, especially when there were a ton of questions at the same station. Like "ID specimens A-Q, and then answer 30 questions about them, in 6 minutes".
I mean, I guess it was fair in the sense that everyone was at the same disadvantage, but at the same time, the test wasnt a fair assessment based on the rules, because of the specimens that werent on the list.
Then again, I basically did the event myself, since my partner had no knowledge about fossils. That was kind of my fault though, since I basically told her not to worry about it at all. The event really is designed around 2 people, but it's just the first one I've had that I couldnt handle completely by myself.
