Codebusters
Hey everybody! Andrew and I wrote and supervised Code at BirdSO. One thing we tried to do was devalue the timed question slightly by bumping up other point values by 1.5x. We didn’t want to do any funky business with the individual questions and make anything unsolvable, but we did try to make the test long enough that there likely wouldn’t be any finishers.
Before I get into the statistics, please take a close look at this next part.
The
wide majority of teams had out-of-browser time. This should not be happening on a Codebusters test. And yes, we can clearly differentiate between accidental 1 second mouse-slips and a 1 minute trip someone takes to Google search a quote, but the point remains that you bring suspicion upon yourself and your team by leaving the Scilympiad tab frequently or for long periods of time.
If you’re out of the browser for 20 minutes, what are you doing? If you leave the browser 100 times during the test, what are you doing?
Just to be clear, these values aren’t even the highest we saw.
Keep in mind that Scioly is not an individual effort. Don’t let a moment’s temptation be what brings embarrassment to your team and school. Event supervisors
will see when you make dubious choices, even if they lack clear evidence for a DQ.
On a lighter note, let’s get into the two tests!
Div C was 28 questions (including the TQ). The scores were actually quite close near the top, which was surprising given that code usually has a couple runaway teams. Congrats to Mountain View Piplup for prevailing with a maximum score of 12619.
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Only 2 teams managed to solve the first Baconian (congrats if that applies to you!). If you were curious, the single-digit prime numbers (2, 3, 5, 7) mapped to A, and the other single digit numbers mapped to B.
Even more surprising was that only 1 team solved the Hill cipher at the end of the test! I’ll chalk this up to time management issues more than anything else, but there were also quite a lot of wrong answers. Remember that the rules state that the event supervisor will give you the decryption matrix. I said this pretty clearly in the prompt, but there were still many teams that tried to encode with a decryption matrix.
Div B was of a similar length (27 questions). Overall, teams fared a bit worse (and the scatterplot is kinda yucky), but that makes sense since Code is a trial event. Kennedy Purple Gallinule managed to eke out the victory here, with a maximum score of 10995. Congrats!
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For some reason, the div B histogram isn't uploading directly to here, but you can view
here.
To me, the most interesting (but understandable) question statistics arose from the Xenocrypts. Only 2 teams solved the first, and nobody got the second. Makes sense given that many people start learning foreign languages in middle school (or even high school).
Overall, teams did really well! Keep on practicing, and remember to represent your school with pride and integrity.
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