Scioly.org

Hi Coaches and Competitors.

Lexington High School in Massachusetts is proud to present the first annual Lexington Invitational! The competition will be held using a MiniSO format for Division B schools only and be held on April 17th 2021 with open 24-hour testing. We hope this later-than-normal tournament date provides national-qualifying teams some extra practice as well as a fun reason to extend the season for all teams, because we all need a bit more Science Olympiad in our lives. The registration fee is $35 for the first team and $30 for each additional team. Registration begins today, February 15th, 2021. We will accept a max of 50 teams total with a maximum of 4 per school. More information and registration can be found at our Scilympiad website: https://scilympiad.com/ma-lexington. Additional information can also be found on this google doc: http://bit.ly/lexingtoninvitational.

All events will be written and proctored by members of the nationally competitive Lexington High School (including our campers!) or other qualified individuals in their respective events. You can expect top-quality, fun tests with lots of interesting and challenging questions on offer.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me (PM on forums or contact through discord) or email lexingtoninvite@gmail.com.

Hope to see many of you through the chat box and registration sheet,
Lexington Science Olympiad Captains and Liasons

Hi people,

Hope your season is going well! Update: we have released a complete event supervisor list at https://sites.google.com/lexingtonma.or ... thuser=0 ! Take a look! We hope to see many of you guys there!

Hi everybody,

Just a reminder to sign up for Lexington Invitational if you haven't already - normal registration closes in a little less than a week! (Midnight on Saturaday, 4/3, EST). Late registration closes 4/10 and has an extra $10 registration. Current notable schools signed up include Beckendorff, Fulton, Jeffrey Trail, Lakeshore, Sierra Vista, Watcher, William Diamond.

Contact me or lexingtoninvite@gmail.com if you have any questions

Come join us virtually and have some fun with your team at the last invite of the season!
Jaime on behalf of the LexSO team

https://duosmium.org/results/2021-04-17 ... tational_b

Results are up! Full ES and TD review comming later today.

Just a clarification if anyone was confused from the results: Kennedy JHS was not the NorCal Kennedy MS, it was a team from Illinois. NorCal Kennedy MS had states that day.

Umaroth wrote: ↑April 26th, 2021, 7:53 am Just a clarification if anyone was confused from the results: Kennedy JHS was not the NorCal Kennedy MS, it was a team from Illinois. NorCal Kennedy MS had states that day.

(Per the results circulated recently, Kennedy JHS finished 8th at IL state this year, in a somewhat reduced field due to Covid.)

Event Supervisor Review
Hi everyone!

My name is Jaime Yu, and this is my first ever event-supervisor review post, so let us kick it off strong. I had the honor of being a co-tournament director at Lexington Invitational as well as being an event supervisor for several events.

• Co-event supervisor for Dynamic Planet along with David Zhou and Daniel Zhang. Test reviewed by Benny Ehlert (BennyTheJett)

• Co-event supervisor for Meteorology along with David Zhou, Daniel Zhang and Evan Xiang (Banana2020). Test reviewed by Gwennie Liu.

• Co-event supervisor for Fossils along with David Zhou and Daniel Zhang. Test reviewed by Benny Ehlert (BennyTheJett)

• Co-event supervisor (more like minimal-question contributor) for Ornithology along with Kayla Yao (ArchdragoonKaela) and Robin Pan

Thank you to everyone that attended our competition - we truly appreciate each and every one of you. Some of these tests were very hard, and I hope you learned a lot from them!

Dynamic Planet

Statistics and Graphs:
Mean: 58.47
Median: 50
Standard Deviation: 28.9
Max: 126
Total Possible Points: 198
Average number of correct Answers/Question: 11.06 (total 29 teams)



Thoughts:

Congratulations to Beckendorff Junior High school for winning this event!

General Organization: Our test was organized by topic and then somewhat by difficulty with each “topic” grading from easy to hard. I really enjoyed this method of organization used at MIT Invitational, so I decided to implement it in our test.

Thoughts by section:
General: this was short, designed as a warm up, all MC. Students generally did very well on this, as expected
Chemical: it started ramping up a little bit after a quick-fire MC section at the beginning. Students seemed to have trouble with the sediment section overall and it seems like a lot of dp-students lack an in-depth knowledge of different sediment types. Surprisingly, only one school attempted the residence time question which was fairly straightforward and honestly a fun question. Looking back, maybe I should have made it worth more points. There was 1 correct answer - I am very proud of that team for pushing through. Generally though, students did fairly well on this section as each question had an average of about 14 correct answers/questions.
Physical: This section was divided into several parts, with a “math” section at the end. It was also the longest section by far. Teams struggled with application questions in general throughout this section - any question that required explaining remained mostly untouched. A lot of teams skipped the math section - I encourage you to try it when you have time. It is not as scary as it looks, I promise. This section was a bit harder, with about 10 correct answers/questions.
Geology: After somewhat of a typical start, it transitioned into a fairly atypical geology section, written mostly by Daniel which required a lot of critical thinking and some primitive math reading. Students generally struggled with this section, as I had expected, with an average of 8 correct answers/questions. However, some students came to me after asking for ways to improve - great job reaching out if you are reading this!

General Thoughts: Overall, I think this test offered fairly good separation of teams and we had nearly a Bell Curve with some outlying teams. I think I added a decent amount of easier “filler” questions. However, in hindsight some questions such as the entertainment one were far above a middle school level, and I should have made them simpler and more approachable.

Feedback Form and Test Release:
Folder with tests: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing
Feedback form (PLEASE FILL OUT THANKS!)
https://forms.gle/3vZDXHBSyZxLQ7QJ9

Fossils

Statistics and Graphs:
Mean: 72.64
Median: 64.49
Standard Deviation: 39.48
Max: 163.33
Total Possible Points: 271.5
Average number of correct Answers/Question: 5.74 (total 30 teams)



Thoughts

Congratulations to Jeffrey Trail Middle School for winning this event!

General Organization: We wrote this test with the intention to cover all the topics on the fossils list to provide students with the best preparation for nationals and so students can figure out what topics they need to work on. As such, we wrote the test following the order of the list. There was some concern over whether or not this would help with ID but I do not think it really made a difference - if you couldn’t tell a fish from a coral, mixing up the order probably wouldn’t have harmed you too much. The first 9 sections were in an image-of-fossil then questions-about-them, while the last 3 covered all the general points. The test was very long as a result, and we were not expecting most teams to finish completely. A separate image sheet was provided as well as embedded images in an attempt to mitigate the scrolling issue. There were no complaints, so I am assuming the issue was successfully mitigated.

Thoughts on the Sections: Too many sections to go one-by-one, so I am going to summarize and pick out highlights.
Identification: I was afraid that ID would be too easy, but that was not the case and feedback I got said that there was a good deal of challenging ID. Thank you so much to Alec Sirek (@alecsiurekphotography) for letting us use some of his photos, and other photos were obtained from god-knows-which page of google and from obscure searches to try to provide new images. Generally, I think we did a good job of this and provided interesting specimens.
Specimen Questions: The questions were mostly pulled from my binder and limited additional research done, as well as background knowledge. We tried to ask about topics we haven’t seen too much to avoid redundancy. However, there was a low number of responses per question, so I believe that we may have made them slightly too hard and should have added in more filler questions. Or it could just be a side effect of people jumping around in a long test. Fossils can easily be a mindless copy-paste from binder event, and I hope that some of our questions required some thinking and putting things into context - what I believe is one of the best parts of fossils.
Station highlights: Stations 5 - 7 (fish through birds) had the lowest Correct Answers per question at around 2.5. These stations were my personal favorite, as they had a focus on evolution and showing change over time (I have studied bird evolution somewhat extensively so I might be biased). Students seemed to have trouble answering some of the questions about the purpose of different morphological elements as well. Station 4 (on molluscs) had the most correct Answers per question at 10, and students found it fairly straightforward as it was primarily pull-from binder/recall.
General Sections: In writing this test, I wanted to go over all the general on the rules, however, I was afraid of making the general section too long. 3/12 stations seemed like a good length though, and most people agreed. Some tests tend to neglect general, and as it's undoubtedly an important part of paleontology I thought it was important to include. The geology section had some good stuff on practical analysis of a rock section, as well as analysis of an image of a rock outcrop. Following was a Lagerstatten/geologic time section - people had little trouble with this. And lastly we had ichnofossils which is a weak point for everybody - me included. Yes, the section is hard, but hopefully everybody learned a bit from it.

General Thoughts: Overall, I am very happy with this test, and I think out of the three main tests I wrote this time, it was probably the best. The score distribution turned out nicely with all the teams spread out, and the top 7 teams separated by about 10 points each. As this was the last Fossils test many kids would be taking in a while and in a way, it ended my Fossils Career - I sincerely hope it was a good one.

Feedback Form and Test Release:
Folder with tests: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing
Feedback form (PLEASE FILL OUT THANKS!)
https://forms.gle/UiRJwZ6JcnCs2G287


Meteorology

Statistics and Graphs:
Mean: 48.4
Median: 38.5
Standard Deviation: 20.7
Max: 91
Total Possible Points: 164.5
Average number of correct Answers/Question: 9.84 (total 32 teams)



Thoughts

Congratulations to Beckendorff Junior High School for winning this event!

General Organization: In writing this test, I took heavy inspiration from Gwennie and Tim’s tests (Umaroth). This test was organized into sections by topics. We hoped to write a test that encouraged and required critical thinking. To do that, students were asked to do a lot of map-analysis and a supplemental document was provided. Each part mostly graded from less difficult introductory MC questions to harder short answer questions.

Review by Section:
Thunderstorms: Our longest section in terms of questions to cover all of the many thunderstorm related questions. Students seemed to do ok on this section, getting nearly 10 correct answers per question. There were some math calculations on how the storm was moving, which most teams skipped. I thought there was a fair number of points offered per question, it was likely just too intimidating.
Tropical Storms: This appeared to be the easiest section by far, with about 15 correct answers per question. It focused on 1 image and asking detailed questions about the Life Cycle of a typhoon.
Winter Storms: This section was harder for students than I had initially expected, with only 6 correct answers per question on average. Students had a hard time figuring out how the upper level winds played in and analyzing how the storm was strengthened.
Mid-latitude Cyclones: This section had a lot of points but was not too long considering that there were a lot of high-point questions. There was an average of 8.7 correct answers per question. Once again, this was similar to winter storms where students had trouble analyzing the upper level air flow and how it matched up and fed the lower level air flow.
General: Some forecasting and radar stuff that we did not put in anywhere else, and then 2 cloud base calculation questions. Overall, teams did somewhat decently on this section but it was not as many “free” points as we had initially hoped.

General Thoughts: Overall, I am fairly happy with how the score distributions turned out, with the exception of a somewhat large clump of scores near the back. Our general section should have included more easy questions to somewhat pad the harder ones. This test asked a lot about the larger scale and upper-atmospheric features that play into the storms that we see, and it appeared that students in general struggled with it, so I hope this test taught everybody a little.

Feedback Form and Test Release:
Folder with tests: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing
Feedback form (PLEASE FILL OUT THANKS!)
https://forms.gle/dnjnDGVLJ1euPbFg8

Ornithology
See co-event supervisor Kayla’s post below

Final Thoughts

Test Difficulty: As an Invitational, our general feedback was that our tests were mostly long and hard - which is what we were going for. For my personal events, the tests were slightly too hard for what I was aiming for and next time I will probably add in some more, easier questions to better separate the lower teams, and to give students more confidence.

As a tournament director, I want to say thank you to everybody who came and made this possible. Thank you all for participating, making our dream come true. We started this season as a school nobody knew, with plans to make a small within-town scrimmage. This invitational has truly become a dream-come-true for all of us, and for that, we have all of you to thank.

Special thanks to all for of our Event Supervisors, especially those from other schools who so graciously offered their time and help when I came asking. These include ArchdragoonKaela, sciolyperson1, builderguy135, Umaroth, willpan99, Banana2020, and BennyTheJett.

Thank you everybody for making this a fun and enjoyable experience!

Postscript: 2021 words by the way.

Hi everyone!

My name is Kayla Yao and I had the honor of being a co-event supervisor for Experimental Design and Ornithology at the inaugural Lexington Invitational. Robin and Jaime (Hoatzin) were my co-event supervisors for Ornithology. Robin and Linda were my co-event supervisors for Experimental Design. Thank you to everyone who competed and congrats on getting through all of the tough tests this invitational had to offer!

Experimental Design

Statistics and Graphs:
Mean: 57.0
Median: 55.5
Standard Deviation: 30.4
Max: 109
Total possible points: 126



Thoughts:
First off, I’d like to say congratulations to Jeffrey Trail Middle School on their first-place finish in this event!

General format: This event utilized online simulations for data collection, with the topic of momentum and collisions. My co-event supervisors and I chose to provide teams with an online simulation as we wanted to provide a topic for this event that is not commonly tested while working around the constraints of requiring teams to obtain their own physical materials. We provided two simulations and corresponding material lists for this event in case teams encountered technical difficulties with one of the simulations.

Grading: This test was worth 126 points, with 124 points coming from the rubric in the National Rules Manual and 2 points from two different questions that helped make the grading process easier and more accurate. One common theme the graders and I noticed was that teams lost out on easy points due to a lack of elaboration or specificity, or simply due to forgetting parts of the rubric. Many teams scored well on Sections A-D but struggled with obtaining full points on the remainder of the sections. This trend was also partially due to the fact that many teams skipped over important instructions. For example, the instructions for Section E (Procedure) indicated that teams should write a procedure as if the simulation was an experiment being conducted in real life; however many teams wrote procedures regarding where to click on the simulation itself. When scoring each test, graders did not horizontal grade each section; we instead graded sections related to each other from the same write up at the same time, before moving on to the next team (for example, one of us graded the sections for Quantitative Data, Graphs, Statistics, and Analysis for one team before moving onto the next). This helped maintain the cohesiveness of each write-up and ensure consistency during the grading process. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us.

I’d like to give a big shout-out to my Experimental Design partner, Emily, who was instrumental in helping us grade these write-ups!

Overall, I was pleased by the score distribution, and hope that you were able to have some fun with this event! If you have any feedback for this test, please fill out this form! We appreciate any feedback, as it will help us improve this event for next year. If you want to contact us directly regarding any aspect of the test or how you were scored, our contact information can also be found in the form.

Ornithology

Statistics and Graphs:
Mean: 69.6
Median: 56.8
Standard Deviation: 43.7
Max: 167.5
Total possible points: 304



Thoughts:
Congrats to Sierra Vista Middle School on their win in this event!

To start off, I’d like to note that my co-event supervisors and I wrote this test with a very high number of questions intending for teams to not finish to compensate for the fact that it is extremely hard to fully prevent cheating in an online setting. Most questions were short answer and free-response type questions, with about half being bird-specific and the other half testing on general information (anatomy, ecology, evolution, etc.). We aimed at having more straightforward questions that required a degree of critical thinking, but there were also many questions that were more recall and binder-based. Many teams did not reach the later stations of the test, but each of the 200+ questions had at least a few attempts from teams overall. We hope that you can use the stations and questions you could not get to as more practice for this event.

Most stations had a fairly easy specimen to identify; we drew on each picture so that competitors could have some fun with the test. None of the doodles should have interfered with the ID process. We awarded full points on identifications that followed the spelling on the National Bird List and half credit to correct identifications with incorrect spellings/hyphenations. Although spelling does not matter in a physical competition, this year’s National Tournament will most likely utilize the autograde feature for bird identification, so we wanted to give teams an opportunity to practice with that. Outside of the ID Lightning Round, teams struggled to identify the egg on Station 2 (Common Murre) and the bird that created the image of an animal on barbed wire in Station 5 (Loggerhead Shrike). Station 21 was a very short station about sampling bird populations, a staple to field research and population ecology. There were a few teams that got to this station, and they did pretty well. This station tested heavily on critical thinking, and I encourage you to take a look at it if you did not get to it on the test.

We wanted to give competitors an opportunity to be exposed to some slightly more in-depth concepts about ornithology, without going too in-depth. We hope that you can use this test as a means to gain some more knowledge about birds!

For any feedback, we would appreciate it if you could fill out this form. You also have the option to contact any of us directly through Discord or email. Again, our contact information is also found in the form.

Finally, we would like to thank sophisSyo for reviewing our test!

Final Thoughts
I would like to give a huge thanks to the rest of the LexSO Board for running an amazing invitational and allowing me the opportunity to be a part of their tournament!

Thanks to all the event supervisors and graders, with who I had some absolutely incredible and downright crazy conversations. Thank you to sciolyperson1, builderguy135, Umaroth, willpan99, BennyTheJett, Banana2020, and all of the other event supervisors that made event supervising really fun!

Thank you to all competitors for competing at the first Lexington Invitational!

Links to tests:
Experimental Design
Ornithology

Hi all!

I was the Digital Structures and Write It CAD It event supervisor for last weekend’s Lexington Invitational! I want to say a big thank you to the Lexington Invitational tournament directors for allowing me to be part of this amazing tournament, and I’ve certainly had fun supervising the last events I’d supervise for this season.

Digital Structures
Not much to say here - even though it was a trial event, we had 18/35 teams participate. The minimum contact width was 51.000 millimeters and the minimum loading distance was 301.000 millimeters.

Out of the 18, 9 teams were placed in tier 1, 3 teams were placed in tier 2, 1 team was placed in tier 3, and the rest were participated. The score distributions can be found here.


Mass of Boomilevers

(Three teams with a <1 gram structure…)

Load Supported In Grams

(11 teams got the 15000 grams held bonus!)

Score


Shout out to Bernard for guiding me through the process on how to run the event. From SkyCiv tournament registration to test set-up to spreadsheeting, you’ve helped me run the event as best I could the full way through.

The LaTeXed Digital Structures test, reflective of the test in Scilympiad, can be found here. The Digital Structures lecture on stress-strain curves can be found here.

The full folder of Digital Structures materials can be found here.

Write It CAD It
Another trial event - this one with higher participation, with 21/35 teams participating. I was quite disappointed with how teams performed: no team came close to finishing, and after grading generously, the high score was less than 33%. Almost half the teams scored below a 10%.

The test itself was on the shorter side - with only 21 pieces, experienced teams could finish it within approximately 10-15 minutes. The model’s screenshots can be found here, and the scrambled pieces can be found here.

Points were given for the following:

• Piece used: Was the piece moved away from the original position?
• Piece position: Was the piece placed in approximately the correct position? Points were given generously
• Piece angling: Was the piece oriented and angled correctly in all three axes?

Statistics
Min: 0 | 0.00%
Max: 217 | 32.29%
Mean: 80.4 | 11.96%
Median: 69 | 10.27% ( not so nice)
Max Possible Score: 672 | 100.00%

Histogram of Scores

Nice distribution for the top few teams, not so nice distribution for the bottom half.

Raw Score Distribution

No teams separated themselves too far ahead of the rest of the pack, which is mildly surprising based on previous competitions. Congrats to Alexander Graham Bell Elementary School for winning!

The LaTeXed Write It CAD It-Writer test, reflective of the test in Scilympiad, can be found here; The Write It CAD It-CADer test can be found here. The lecture from the awards ceremony can be found here.

The full folder of Write It CAD It materials can be found here. If you’ve taken one of my WICI tests, I'd love to hear your feedback!

Lexington Invitational has been one of my favorite competitions to supervise for this year! Thanks again to the amazing tournament directors for giving the privilege to supervise these events for competition, and to the competitors, thank you for competing!

Hi all,

TallMrGreat and I wrote the Road Scholar exam for LexSO. Thank you to everyone who helped out with this competition, and those who competed!

Statistics
For the purpose of statistics, DQed teams were included in the statistics calculation.
Average: 63.25/229
Maximum: 148.97/229
Median: 54.50/229
Standard Deviation: 34.02

Graphs



Thoughts

While I don't have too many thoughts about the test itself, I have a few comments to make about academic integrity violations.

First, out of 30 teams, 7 teams were disqualified, all for very clearly using online resources not permitted in the rules. It is abundantly clear which teams cheated; questions were singled out which could be used to detect whether or not a team used external resources. While this may seem like "catch" questions, they are not: catch questions, by definition, are questions designed to single teams out through employing questions that are considered "impossible" to solve, or one that is purposefully deceptive. None of the questions we used to detect cheating were impossible or even "deceptive" - each had extremely straightforward solve paths that one could take to obtain the correct answer.

One question asked for the elevation of a mountain on a topographic map, worth only one point - any reasonable competitor would read the elevation on the map, copy down the number in the answer box (1455m), and get the point. Several teams, however, decided to Google the question, which resulted in the answer of "4,754′". This is the incorrect answer, even if the units were changed - 1455m is equal to 4774 feet, not 4754. Another reason for disqualification included measuring the (incorrect) latitude/longitude of locations on a map up to as many as four decimal places, the same coordinates which conveniently appeared on Google, but is slightly different in the map.

We'll be releasing the test and key soon along with the rest of the tests in the test release (5/1), and it'll also be posted to my userpage when I find the time. If you have any questions, feel free to PM me on Discord - my username is AC#9999.