Dynamic Planet B/C

[Jimean716]

So is the Caspian Sea considered a lake or not? If asked on a test to rank the largest lakes, should I include it?

Yes

[Luo]

The Dynamic Planet test at Nationals was unlike any I'd taken before. I was clueless for a large portion of it. What'd you all think?

[gyourkoshaven]

I don't know about C, but I felt that the B test was too short and too heavily emphasized maps.

[Luo]

I don't know about C, but I felt that the B test was too short and too heavily emphasized maps.

Wow, that's interesting. The C Division supervisor told us that he wrote the test so that no teams would be able to finish (thus, it was really long). What did other people think of the C Division test?

[The Eviscerator]

The Dynamic Planet test at Nationals was unlike any I'd taken before. I was clueless for a large portion of it. What'd you all think?

I thought the test was crap. It was largely math based with some easy interpretation questions and some more tedious math. You didn't really need to know much to do it, but you needed to be fast with punching things in your calculator and counting squares. I studied a lot for the event and am really angry that so little knowledge was needed to take the test. And even most of the analysis was common sense.
For example: Which river (A, B, or C) would most likely be found in the mountains and why? And the answer would simply be: C because it has the highest velocity and mountains have steeper gradients.
And there were other stupid things like this one: They gave us a picture of a watershed on grid paper and told us to find the area of the watershed with the hint that each square on the grid was 5 square km or something. Then they told us to find the entire area of the watershed. In order to find the answer, you needed to count all of the individual squares on the picture and then multiply by 5. So easy, a 2nd grader could do it, but it took a lot of time and was imprecise since there were a lot of partial squares and I think we counted 102 total complete squares.
And then there was a chart that you had to fill in just by using the Manning Equation. All you needed was the Manning Equation and you could ace the section as long as you punched everything into your calculator correctly.

I don't know about C, but I felt that the B test was too short and too heavily emphasized maps.

Wow, that's interesting. The C Division supervisor told us that he wrote the test so that no teams would be able to finish (thus, it was really long). What did other people think of the C Division test?

Yeah, I remember that too. It wasn't that long and we finished.


rant, rant, rant, rant, sigh. We got 11th

I hope for a legit conceptual test next year.

[Luo]

[quote="The Eviscerator"][quote="luo"]The Dynamic Planet test at Nationals was unlike any I'd taken before. I was clueless for a large portion of it. What'd you all think?[/quote]
I thought the test was crap. It was largely math based with some easy interpretation questions and some more tedious math. You didn't really need to know much to do it, but you needed to be fast with punching things in your calculator and counting squares. I studied a lot for the event and am really angry that so little knowledge was needed to take the test. And even most of the analysis was common sense.
For example: Which river (A, B, or C) would most likely be found in the mountains and why? And the answer would simply be: C because it has the highest velocity and mountains have steeper gradients.
And there were other stupid things like this one: They gave us a picture of a watershed on grid paper and told us to find the area of the watershed with the hint that each square on the grid was 5 square km or something. Then they told us to find the entire area of the watershed. In order to find the answer, you needed to count all of the individual squares on the picture and then multiply by 5. So easy, a 2nd grader could do it, but it took a lot of time and was imprecise since there were a lot of partial squares and I think we counted 102 total complete squares.
And then there was a chart that you had to fill in just by using the Manning Equation. All you needed was the Manning Equation and you could ace the section as long as you punched everything into your calculator correctly.

[quote="luo"][quote="gyourkoshaven"]I don't know about C, but I felt that the B test was too short and too heavily emphasized maps.[/quote]
Wow, that's interesting. The C Division supervisor told us that he wrote the test so that no teams would be able to finish (thus, it was really long). What did other people think of the C Division test?[/quote]
Yeah, I remember that too. It wasn't that long and we finished.


rant, rant, rant, rant, sigh. We got 11th

I hope for a legit conceptual test next year.[/quote]
Wow, you actually finished? You must have worked very fast. And yeah, I didn't like the test either. I share your hope for a more conceptual test next year.

[L42]

I thought the Nationals test was pretty good this year- it was exactly what was written in the rules. I felt the questions did require some knowledge of the topics- more so than in years past. I also felt the test was pretty hard. Dynamic is supposed to be run with some application-type questions- even though I personally prefer knowledge questions and would like more of them.

[Luo]

I was quite confused on the Manning's Equation section because sometimes there was more than one unknown in the equation. What am I missing? What things (other than the obvious height, depth, etc.) were you expected to determine based on the stream cross-section?

[The Eviscerator]

I'm not angry that there were application questions; I'm angry that the application questions were ridiculously easy to the point where you didn't actually need to know any Dynamic Planet to answer correctly. And yes, there was almost no knowledge based questions, which was also really aggravating.

Everything you needed was in the Manning Equation section. It was just a matter of rearranging the equation to solve for the different variables.

[Luo]

Everything you needed was in the Manning Equation section. It was just a matter of rearranging the equation to solve for the different variables.

Hm, I must have misunderstood either the chart, graph, or equation, then. In a couple cases it seemed to me that there wasn't sufficient data given to solve for the unknowns.