US Geography Olympiad Nationals Discussion Thread

[Great Bustard]

Discuss anything related to USGO Nationals Here

[tabstop]

This probably won't help anyone who's actually here, but: I am noticing that the "all players" schedule is not containing all the players. The schedules by round, however, are complete so if you seem to be missing, please check there. I will be looking into what's going on. EDIT: No I think we're okay now. Sorry for the confusion.

[Panayot Hitov]

The Quiz Bowl questions were lacking in geography.

[Southern Double-collared Sunbirb]

um...uh...yeah. What can I say, I won. somehow.

I see Madden has took my 1/1 transportation request to heart. As in the finals tossup on the Boston T, and the short-answer question on "bus rapid transit".

Some of the questions weren't quite geography, similarly to the History Bowl, which sometimes produces a jarring "what is this lit doing here?" effect.

The written exam was interesting. I'm not a fan of multiple-choice in general, but given this is to see how one would do in iGeo, it's understandable. I could narrow nearly all questions I wasn't quite sure of the answer to to two options. This would be understandable-- one obviously wrong answer, and one you'd have to really know some things to rule out. Works well.

Short-answer tested knowledge on facts admirably, though from what I've seen, iGeo questions are more analytical than that. Go more in the direction of questions that test knowledge of geographic concepts, not just facts.

that's all I got.

[Angry Babies in Love]

um...uh...yeah. What can I say, I won. somehow.

I see Madden has took my 1/1 transportation request to heart. As in the finals tossup on the Boston T, and the short-answer question on "bus rapid transit".

Some of the questions weren't quite geography, similarly to the History Bowl, which sometimes produces a jarring "what is this lit doing here?" effect.

The written exam was interesting. I'm not a fan of multiple-choice in general, but given this is to see how one would do in iGeo, it's understandable. I could narrow nearly all questions I wasn't quite sure of the answer to to two options. This would be understandable-- one obviously wrong answer, and one you'd have to really know some things to rule out. Works well.

Short-answer tested knowledge on facts admirably, though from what I've seen, iGeo questions are more analytical than that. Go more in the direction of questions that test knowledge of geographic concepts, not just facts.

that's all I got.

The BRT question was my doing, actually.

And the original intent of the short answer portion was to be more analytical (for that exact reason), the issue with that is that we would have to have people with legitimate backgrounds in geography grading them if we ask for more than a succinct factual answer.

By the way, full stats should be posted in the coming days, as will the two tests.

Anton won all three events in varsity and Tajin Rogers (St. Anselm's), Abhinav Kurada (AMSA Charter), and Nilai Sarda (Westminster) winning the quizbowl, multiple choice, and short answer portions, respectively, in JV. The overall winner for JV was Abhinav.

[Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin]

When are the exams/sets cleared?

[Great Bustard]

The quizbowl set is posted on HSAPQ's website along with the NHBB set from Nationals. The exams and their respective answer keys have been sent to our webmaster, who should have them up at geographyolympiad.com by the end of the weekend. A few concluding thoughts here. First, it was great to see over 150 students take part in this - hopefully that will rise to over 200 next year. Certainly there are a slew of Geography Bee veterans who we will try and appeal to more for next year. With luck, some of these people will venture out to NHBB and other quizbowl tournaments too.

I think the qualifying process for USGO will remain basically the same for next year. By the following year, it could be fun to have a quizbowl set for regionals (at least as an option), though we're still a ways away from creating a critical mass of potential participants, especially as that then would not be combined with NHBB regionals, but rather its own thing. If that does happen some day, it would be as a complement to the regional qualifying exams for qualifying purposes, not as a replacement though.

At Nationals, hopefully people will get the message farther off in advance that USGO does not have the same Varsity / JV cutoff that NHBB does. That ended up causing a lot of inconvenience when people signed up for the wrong division. Overall, I think things basically went ok at Nationals - we hopefully can run a bit more efficiently during the quizbowl portion next year (the opening ceremonies will likely be moved up to 6:30). I am also inclined to keep the exam portion, but combine the two portions into one overall exam grade. We'd probably then take the top overall, the top 2 from quizbowl, and the top exam scorer as the four to make the international team. If the top exam scorer overlapped elsewhere, we would also take the 2nd exam scorer. Thereafter, we would take second overall and so on from the overall rankings.

For people who did it, would there be a preference to scrap the exam altogether and go over to four rounds of quizbowl prelims, or did people think there was value to having an exam component? Keep in mind the international competition lacks any sort of quizbowl component (though we'll bring a buzzer over to Kyoto for fun and perhaps do an informal mirror of the quizbowl set for whoever wants to play it from other countries). Congratulations to Anton, Pranav, Joe, and Nirav for making Team USA, to all our medalists, and thanks to everyone who helped out!

[Schmidt Sting Pain Index]

I think having an all quiz bowl would definitely be more fun, but I see two main issues with this. 1. There is no buzzer related competition at iGeo, so USGO would not really be selecting the 4 people that have the highest potential of success there. 2. It would be completely pointless to have the regional qualifier as a multiple choice test, since that is testing something completely different than what would be at the USGO. I like the idea of combining the two tests as that could possibly provide enough time to fit in another prelim round.

[Great Bustard]

Just as a clarification, HSAPQ was not instructed to write the USGO quizbowl set with an eye towards avoiding repeats in with the NHBB set. Apologies if this threw anyone off - this should be fixed for next year.