My last ever invitational
Okay so here are some reviews:
Designer Genes (15): First of all, thank you supervisors for putting up with us lol....we asked to work on the floor and everyone was confused. Concerning the actual test, I really liked the material cover – a solid span of the usual pedigrees, cellular replication, biotechnology etc. I would say my main complaint, but more of a personal one (affecting us), was the style of the test. I know that a narrative test is fun, and perhaps it might help differentiate teams who can really work efficiently, but it was pretty time consuming, especially because we kept throwing test parts at each other. I think it was a good experience for us, because it really pushes the test takers, but take this with a grain of salt: I fail to really see the point of creating a narrative Designer Genes test. I would assume that non-narrative tests are usually fine (you can knock out a lot of ppl with biotech questions) since they are the standard for bio events (I've only ever seen long, full narrative tests for forensics?). 8.5/10
Ornithology (16): Omg thank you so much – whoever came up with making everyone stand on the side without chairs is a genius. Every time I've gone to a comp that did stations for orni, the room was an utter mess after each block because it was hard for people to move from station to station, and everyone dropped stuff. About the test, while I personally appreciated the rest station, I would have rather had an extra station, because we had extra time for the stations where we had the information, which I did not expect for 100 second stations. I'm not sure what the score distribution looked like, but I think that even though the stations are only 100s, more difficult questions/sounds definitely could have been added because I think someone could have full-scored that test. Also, lol at the station that just described five sounds. 7.5/10
Protein Modeling (8; ouch ouch cry): So disregarding our placement because we kinda screwed up, this test was pleasantly more difficult than I expected. I can't speak much for the written test section but I saw some questions (I did the JMol). I liked the JMol section because some invites I've gone to just had ridiculously short JMol sections (like, 10 questions?) and for only one PDB file. Having that webpage was a nice touch. From what I saw of the written test, it was challenging, although I think we just took a complete L on a couple of questions lol. Yeah, I don't really have any major complaints:) 9.5/10
WIDI (11): Yaaaaay this personally made me very happy:) But about the WIDI itself, the last time I did WIDI at SOUP was 3 yr ago (3rd place), and that WIDI was incredibly, incredibly complicated. This WIDI was not really very complicated, and I had no trouble at all finishing early (my partner had a couple pieces left to write in the instructions, but from what I've seen at other competitions and in the past, they could have gone more psycho with the WIDI). My only complaint is maybe that we took some time to set up? But that doesn't matter for doers, does it?:) 8/10
Overall (11): thank you all for a wonderful last Science Olympiad invitational. I don't think it has hit me yet, but this is weirdly significant for me because I've been doing Scioly for so long. This tournament was really crazy for us because we did not have high expectations for ourselves, and everyone passed out right after the tournament so we almost missed the beginning of awards livestreams (very happy and proud of my team
)I really appreciate how every volunteer tried their best to be accommodating and everyone was friendly and helpful. It has improved so much over the past couple of years. Thank you for your time and effort, and congratulations to all the teams!!!
[9.5/10]
I believe we finished with 2:19 ish? on the timed question, and we blanked on a TON of questions, like @dragonfruit35 said earlier. Regardless, I think the test was a good length, and the questions were (clearly) of an appropriate difficulty. Auditoriums are never an ideal location for this event, but it seems like they're almost inevitable. Needless to say, we're gonna be grinding a lot after this, so here's to reviving the streak! [9/10]