The University of Texas at Austin Invitational 2020
Posted: August 7th, 2020, 1:10 pm
ATX Science Olympiad is excited to announce our sixth annual invitational tournament from October 23-25, 2020! Registration will open at 1:00 PM C.T on Friday, August 21 for Texas teams and at 1:00 PM C.T on Saturday, August 22 for all others at scilympiad.com/ut-invite.
Due to COVID-19, our tournament will take place virtually. We will run the events listed here. These are the events specified by the miniSO format, without Game On and with the addition of Detector Building. Furthermore, we’ll have a couple of trial events, including the ever-popular Data Science.
This year, the theme for our tournament is accessibility. The transition to virtual events disproportionately impacts certain groups more than others, and we want our tournament to be as accessible as possible to anyone on any team, large or small, regardless of the barriers they face. After consulting with teams and coaches from around the country and reviewing the results of our pre-season survey, here are a couple of changes we’re making:
- Flexible timing and no event conflicts. Competitors will be allowed to take timed exams during an extended testing window. This way, unstable internet connections, family commitments, jobs, etc. will be less of a barrier to competing. Additionally, competitors will not have to worry about event conflicts, which disproportionately affect teams with less students..
- Larger and more geographically diverse than ever. This tournament is open to teams from any state. We will guarantee registration to the first 60 teams in each division and first 40 teams from Texas, making it our largest tournament ever.
- Verified scoring for every test. By using Scilympiad, we can enforce time limits on exams, auto-grade certain types of questions, and have event supervisors score every test. As a result, we can allow a huge number of teams to compete while still ensuring the integrity and legitimacy of the competition at all levels.
This tournament will have a fee of $45 per team, which is waived for all Title I schools. As always, we do not require any payment at the time of registration.
If this registration fee (or any other aspect of our tournament, such as having no prior experience with Scilympiad) is a barrier to your team’s participation in our tournament, please shoot us an email at atxscioly@gmail.com so we can find something that works for you. We want every part of this tournament to be as stress-free as possible and we will be flexible and accommodating at every step. We hope to see y’all at our tournament in October!
If you are an alum interested in helping run our tournament, please fill out this form to apply to be an event supervisor or this form to join the Exam Review Committee - we’d love to have you!
Love,
ATX Science Olympiad
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