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We are super excited to announce that Duke University Science Olympiad will be hosting the third annual Duke Invitational on January 30th, 2021! Registration will open 12:00 AM ET on Sunday, November 1st, 2020! More information + updates can be found on our website at https://dukescioly.org.

This year we will be hosting our tournament under the mini SO model. On Scilympiad, all tests will open on January 30th, 2021 at 9am ET and close on January 31st, 9am ET. Teams will still have a time limit of an hour to take the tests, but may take them any time over the 24 hour time period (subject to change). Grading will occur throughout the week; results will be announced and awards will be shipped the following weekend. Due to logistical constraints, the tournament will run 19 of 23 Division C national events, as well as a few trial events in place of Ping-pong parachute, Wright stuff, Boomilever, and Detector building. Tests will be written by experienced alumni at Duke and former Science Olympiad competitors from the highest level of competition!

This year, as we are looking to expand our tournament, we tentatively do not have a cap on the number of teams that can participate (registration will be on a first-come first-serve basis if we do form a cap). There is a registration fee of $40, with $20 for each additional team. We are also willing to help teams that need financial aid or planning to come to our tournament!

Although the COVID-19 pandemic has created new challenges for everyone in the Science Olympiad community, we promise to make our virtual tournament as accommodating and engaging as possible. We hope to see you at our tournament in January! If you have any questions, please feel free to email us at dukescioly@gmail.com.

Reminder that registration opens in a week at 12:00 AM ET on Sunday, November 1st! Make sure to head to our tournament page https://scilympiad.com/duso to register your teams!

Registration is now open! Head to our tournament page at https://scilympiad.com/duso to register your teams

Reminder to register for our invitational on https://scilympiad.com/duso! Since we have a team cap of 150, there are only 8 spots left!

Good luck to anyone out there competing tomorrow!

This is a final reminder that competition day is tomorrow, Jan 30th! If you have any questions, please let us know at dukescioly@gmail.com. Thank you for your interest in DUSO, and best of luck to everyone tomorrow!

Event Supervisor Review

Hi! My name is Robert Lee and I am the co-ES for Astronomy (with Joey Zhou and Tony Sun) and Machines (with Alexander Tong). Firstly, I would like to thank the tournament staff for making this invitational possible and supporting us ESs through the whole process. Also, I want to give a shoutout to my co-ESs for making the test super easy to write and fun to supervise. Finally, I want to congratulate all of the teams who competed last week (all ~140 of you!), competing in Science Olympiad online is a feat in and of itself without all of the difficult tests and the stress of doing well. I hope you all had a great time at DUSO.

Astronomy

Statistics:
Mean: 59.3 (39.5%)
Median: 58.5 (39%)
St. Dev.: 25.2
Max: 141 (94%)

Graphs: More in-depth statistics and graphs pertaining to sections and specific questions can be found at this link.

Thoughts:
Overall, this test was really balanced, with teams scoring across the entire point range. The trendline is extremely linear minus the few teams at the top that pulled away rather significantly, with the first place team pulling away by 20+ points. For this test, we used an image sheet to centralize all of the images and to bring back that separate image sheet vibe of in-person tournaments. This also let the images be much higher resolution and (I hope) helped with the graph reading in Section C.

• Section A (General Knowledge) was written by Joey. Questions were straight-forward and touched on the majority of the major topics, but passed up on harder concepts like cosmology. Teams were able to score well in this section and had a good distribution centered at around 30/60 points.
• Section B (Deep-Sky Objects) was written by Tony. These questions were on the easier side, which can be seen in the distribution peaking at around 30/40 points. We wanted to reward the teams who did the proper research beforehand on each of the objects; however, a few conceptual questions were included to pick out the teams who really knew their stuff. One team managed to get 40/40 points in this section!
• Section C (Calculations) was written by me. Compared to many of the calculation sections I've written this year, this section was on the easier side, but teams said they felt this section was hard enough. Common calculations with parallax, Stefan-Boltzmann, and binary system/Kepler's 3rd Law were asked, with teams scoring full score on each. I also included a more unusual question on surface gravity which teams expectedly scored lower on. This section was where the top ~50 teams differentiated themselves. Understanding how to do various astronomy calculations is extremely important to doing well on these tests and I hope teams can use this test to study with.

Test Folder:
The exam and all other material can be found in this folder.

Machines

Statistics:
Mean: 35.2 (23.5%)
Median: 31.3 (20.9%)
St. Dev.: 17.2
Max: 87 (58%)

Graphs: More in-depth statistics and graphs pertaining to sections and specific questions can be found at this link.

Thoughts:
I am pretty disappointed with the distribution of the scores. With tricky multiple choice questions and daunting free response questions, the test was too hard for this invitational. Adjustments should have been made to many of the questions to ease up on the difficulty. However, some teams were still able to succeed with the top 10 teams scoring well above their expected score and proving their mastery of the event.

• Section A (Multiple Choice) was rough. Teams averaged around 20/60 points which is far from the 40-50/60 point expectation I normally have with these questions. This section is supposed to be a gentle introduction to the test, but teams found it to be challenging within the first six questions. I hope teams can at least use these questions as a good place to learn new concepts. We also had to drop two questions from scoring (Qs 23 and 29) as we made a mistake in our calculations. This has been fixed in the test release below.
• Section B (Free Response) had an expected distribution, but scores averaged lower than I would have liked them to be. Once again, around 50% of the teams submitted a response for question B2 (device design) and received 11.5 points on average. Unfortunately, many teams messed up on the percent error question, dividing by the experimental ratio instead of the actual ratio. After reading through the answers for the other sub-questions, I felt that they could still be adjusted to have better wording, so I apologize for that. For question B1 and B3, teams did well; however, I feel these questions could have been made easier so the question was more attemptable. Specifically, I should have included a diagram for B1 to minimize the confusion with the description. Finally, there's question B4. Out of all of the free response questions I've written all season, this one is 100% my favorite one. Unfortunately, only one team solved the majority of the question (scoring 28.5/30), so I would like to give a shoutout to Allison Eto and Riana Santos from the team Iolani Artichokie. As a test writer, it makes my day when I'm grading and see a team just gets a question I really enjoyed writing. I hope teams will be able to look through the solutions file in the test release (below!), which walks through all of the questions in Section B.

Test Folder:
The exam and all other material can be found in this folder.

Test Feedback

If you have feedback for either test, feel free to leave it here! I would appreciate it a ton, since feedback helps a lot with gauging what I need to adjust in my tests. The test codes are as follows:

• Astronomy: 2021DUSO-AstronomyC-Candle
• Machines: 2021DUSO-MachinesC-Silo

Results!
1. William G. Enloe High School
2. Adlai E. Stevenson High School
3. New Trier High School
4. North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics
5. John P. Stevens High School
6. North Hollywood High School