How'd everyone do this weekend?

[mathslug]

November 18th at Judson was a pretty competative meet. I was mediocre throughout the whole day, but I have to say that I'm happy that we tyrannosaurs made the 1.5 hr drive to Converse. Veterans Memorial, John Jay, and Oconner appear to be in full force this year, and I am happy that I got to see that kind of competition. I scored a 171 in NS and got 6th in the Veteran division. I need to not make so many freaking mistakes on these tests. I did 54 and missed 11!!! ARGH! I still have yet to break 200 at a meet. Gotta find some way to settle my nerves... Calculator Apps was by far my worst event. It was 30 minutes of complete and utter disaster. There were at least two numerical problems in which I hit the clear button at the end of a problem instead of the divide button, and from there on, well, I guess I just kind of freaked. Needless to say, I didnt do so hot and I ended up with a 115 and a meager 12th Grade 8th place. Math seemed easier than what I'm used to. I mean, I've never scored over 134 on a TMSCA math test and I got a 180 on this one. Yea! I'm guessing that it wasnt that special of a score since it only got me a 12th grade 6th place certificate. Science was harder than I expected, at least in the bio section. I did pretty well, scoring a 196 (22 Bio, 104 Chem, and 70 Physics). I still can't believe a 104 didnt win chemistry!!! grr... Those stupid history questions get me everytime. Anyway, the last meet of the day was comp sci. The test was unbelievably easy. I got all the hard ones right, and all the dumb ones wrong. In the end, I didnt even make the top 6... I scored a 192 and got 7th. Well, eh... it'll teach me to be more careful in checking over my answers next time.

So yeah, thats me. How'd all you guys do? And what did you think about the tests?

[kashhustler]

i went to the Northshore contest today

meh...although i still placed well my scores were considerably lower than usual

the math test was really easy and i typed in 3 questions into my calculator wrong and missed 7 which was pretty sad...just about all were silly mistakes so i ended up with 280 3rd place

number sense was about average difficulty but i missed 13 which was just depressing =( ended up with 283 3rd place

imo calculator is much harder this year basically everybody that i know is getting owned so i'm not really complaining except i could have missed a few less crunch questions ended up with 227 1st place

and since i # at science i was pretty happy with 68 5 place

klein did pretty good we won all the subjects except for science and won sweepstakes. it was pretty funny...the scores gradewise at the contest were like 10th > 11th > 9th = 12th in math, number sense
klein's sophomores basically owned number sense we had 337, 284, 283, 281 taking the top 4 scores at the contest =)

[NickR]

Heh, I also went to North Shore...11th grade.

Got owned in Number Sense as usual...went to 51ish and got a 210 and people from klein beat the crap outta me haha.

Calculator, I actually pulled it together and got a 279 and didn't miss any punch (woot!).

On general math I answered more than normal (the test did seem kinda easier) and got 284 after following Akash's advice on going through earlier tests : ).

Science...not pretty...like a 90 or so.

Overall a pretty good day, I suppose.

[hhhsmath06]

you guys are making me wanting to print out a ns test...after 6 months of not seeing a single ns problem.

q

[Roel]

Ha, i also think the tests have been getting easier or at least the math ones have cause i dunno about the science.

The NS was pretty easy for most of the first part. I started off missing only one question on the first 3 columns but got 4 wrong on the last one. Well, i still got a 355, but for some reason or another i tend to mess up on those final 20 problems.
On the CL test i missed 3 calculations. I got a 244 which sounds ok, except when its 2nd place next to a 308, it aint good at all. But that competition should make my score go up since we meet with PSJA every weekend.
Math tests have been faster in my opinion. On 2 problems i took about 5-6 minutes and i only ended up doing one of them. I shoulda skipped them so i could have enough time for the last page. I ended up doing 50 problems and missing one(292).

Man, i really wish i could go to a UIL meet at the houston area since the only time i get to compete against them are at TMSCA state and UIL state.

[MistaPotta]

The results didn't make it into our bag, but "will be mailed to us." :roll: They'll be up when I get them.

Our scores were:
NS - Amy 323, Oliver 301, Susan 283
CA - Nathan 220, Susan 178, Oliver 157, and still took team >.<
MA - Susan 300, Amy, 276, Oliver, 246
SC - Nicolas, 240, Nathan 224, Susan, 152
CS - Nathan 216, Nicolas 206, Oliver, 168

They used UIL-style sweepstakes, Our TMSCA Sweepstakes score was 3812.

Is calculator really that much harder or is it just four different font faces on some pages are really distracting? TMSCA #6/UIL "C" should be much more telling with that regard. Of course, our team is still doing quite poorly wrt Calc.

Roel - I know LJHS goes to San Antonio often. The southwestern Houston suburbs (Ft. Bend schools, for example) are only an hour further. I'm sure Mrs. Garza would plan a trip to go up against the higher talent pool there.

Zack - Enjin Sun (MacArthur) had a 112 in Chemistry - missed the first problem. 70 took Bio, and Nathan had 90 for Physics. Grading the Bio section was like listening to chalkboard scratchings. So many negative scores. And it was Victoria Memorial. So many schools in South Texas named Memorial. :)

[Quelloquialism]

I went to the Lubbock High meet. I don't know Lubbock High's team scores, though...

My personal scores were (11th grade, Large School):
Number Sense -- 123, 8th place (half-asleep on this test...my accuracy was terrible, and my speed was worse)
Calculator -- 213, 1st place (I finally broke 200 this year! Last year, I had a 241, and this year, I've just dropped like a rock...I was happy to see that I still have at least a little hope)
Mathematics -- 228, 2nd place (I broke my personal record from last year's UIL D/TMSCA#12, and I still failed to team-score...I remember our team scores were Kurt Litsch, who got above 300, George Huang, Kiefer Aguilar, and Darci Barney, who each scored somewhere between 240 and 290)
Science -- 152, 3rd place (such a weird test...I got a 106 in Chemistry, missing top Chem by 2 points to Stanley Cho, and then followed up with my worse Biology score ever, a 16, and a pretty-bad Physics score, a 30)
Computer Science -- 200, 1st place (first place didn't mean anything here, though--I was the only Large School Computer Science competitor at the entire meet...as for the score, I was disappointed--it was the easiest CS test I've ever taken, and yet I destroyed my score with five of the stupidest mistakes ever--proof: I missed two on the first page, which was basically a series of "What is output by the straight-forward println() statement to the right?")

[mathslug]

Dont even get me started on dumb mistakes on the CS test... I missed the one on the first page that said int frodo = '0'; What is the output of println(frodo)... I didnt see the int part, so I put 0. I feel so freaking retarded. I also missed that one that Big O question because I didnt even look at the method... The linear search that they used checks every member of the array no matter what, and I treated it like a linear search that stops when it finds the value its looking for. I cant believe I didnt even read the provided code! lol, I even missed the one that asked for the number of local variables present in a sample program. I circled 1, the number of instance variables present... My other mistakes were even dumber than that... so I'll stop ranting.

I had no idea that the Bio section of the science test was that difficult. I just kind of assumed that I was really bad at biology, and that the questions in that section werent hard at all, so this makes me feel better. Seriously, though, how can you cram that much knowledge into your head without have taken AP bio? I'm taking that course this year, but we havent learned more than about 5% of the stuff I see on these tests.

Zack

[hhhsmath06]

Zack,
in my OPINION, unless u:
1. are astronomically enthusiastic about biology
2. have a super hard bio teacher who teaches everything @ university level
3. extremely motivated individual who reads the lastest edition of campbell + reece 10 times back and forth.

...unless u are one of the 3 above...bio will be tough
i 5ed apbio back in my junior yr...trust me, getting a 5 on an ap test doesn't mean a thing other than proving u a good test taker...

i have ppl who 5ed the ap chem in my honors chem class right now, they wanted it again to get a gpa boost....and boy...are they struggling...

but then again...i am speaking from my experience...only my opinion...

q

[Quelloquialism]

[bradp]

The TMSCA tests have really obscure and difficult bio questions.
Crazy questions like "who is the father of botany?" or "In the the January 2002 Edition of Natural Science, what did the article about x say about y?"

The UIL tests are much easier (and don't have tons of mistakes and questionable answers.)

[MichaelGummelt]

We hosted our first ever CS meet. It was pretty small with only 10 teams, but it went relatively smoothly. I didn't compete of course, but the consensus seemed to be that the written test was incredibly easy. Top 4 scores in our advanced division were 232, 224, 224, 224. 3 of which were from Whitehouse, which gave them a 680 team score, which is possibly the highest I've ever seen. Our team wrote the programming set, however, and I guess we made it too hard. It should be up on cistests.com sometime if any of the CS people here want to check it out, but it proved to be really really really hard for the teams that were there. 1st place team had 19 points, second had 11 out of 96.