"Official" 2014 USABO thread

<p>think of any other question, lucky?</p>

<p>I guess, but it’s not impossible either?
I should’ve probably added that there would be some other underlying condition like diabetes or cushing’s syndrome which can be aggravated by becoming pregnant.
Eitherways hopefully the test graders will smile more leniently upon me or just change up the weights of part C (plsplsplsplsplsplsplspslpslpls) haha</p>

<p>Overall, I did not do so well on part C so i really need to bank on part A and B. but when 1 part C question is equal to 12+ part B and about 25 part A, idk how things are going to turn out- Especially when I thought part B and A were much better evaluations of knowledge compared to the narrow scopes of part C /:</p>

<p>what of A and B then?</p>

<p>I thought A and B were both much easier than the open, but that may be just me. A few stupid mistakes here and there but hopefully ~45/60 for both of them.
I feel like I was unsure of about 13 questions and I probably lost a few more to other things but here’s to crossing my fingers. </p>

<p>any questions you remember that were particularly difficult lol </p>

<p>oh man I took it pretty early so my memory is a bit iffy. There was the HMWE or something and P(x) stuff that was confusing at first. And there was a “which organism fits this survivorship curve” thing that bothered me for a bit.There’s quite a couple of questions that I logged on a chat with my friend so I might pull that back up </p>

<p>tbh i never expected to make finals the moment I embarked on this USABO journey so once I was done, I purged my brain for a bit with a netflix marathon xD</p>

<p>I wrote the wrong hormone for the “what other hormones are affected” part and got it wrong, but I correctly explained what the hormone did on the next part of the question. Does this mean I’ll get credit on that second part?</p>

<p>I thought it was Cushing’s syndrome like @Lucky139 said; I read into part 2 of Question 3 and saw that there were fat deposits and I put Cushing’s. I explained headache and loss of peripheral as side effects of high blood pressure. No explanation for PRL levels though.</p>

<p>ACTH definitely malfunctioning along with cortisol</p>

<p>Does anyone that has taken stats know the answers to the multiple choice questions about specific and sensitive?</p>

<p>I thought they were all false… a negative result on a sensitive test tells you don’t have the disease, and a positive result on a specific test tells you you probably do. </p>

<p>How did you guys do on the second part of part c</p>

<p>Not well. I have worked in a bio lab for the last few months, so I thought I would be fine for biotechnology. However, I only knew about the general process, not the specific details. That process is outdated and is rarely used anymore. </p>

<p>This is what I put for 2C :
a) ssDNA is used to hybridize to a specific mRNA strand
b) alternative RNA splicing
c) not baking would make mRNA stand diffuse and blend into the membrane all over the place and some would fall out and it would not be good
d) i said that the nitocellulose was not baked ( just a gues)
e) mRNA dye is not specific and would just make all of the mRNA show instead of showing one.</p>

<p>I put overactive pituitary due to tumor for the last part… hence the elevated prolactin and high blood pressure.</p>

<p>i said anterior to be specific because if it was the posterior then there would a whole lot of other problems than what she was having. Although i think that they would not take off for not saying anterior.</p>

<p>I put mostly the same things for the second part of C, but I still don’t understand the purpose of the poly-A ssDNA. In the procedure that was given, both poly-A ssDNA and a radioactive probe were added. Isn’t the probe’s job to hybridize? </p>

<p>for number 2C B I wrote something about inactivation of genes as it becomes adult cells
like methylation
hm</p>

<p>i wrote about multigene families. as for the specific/sensitive, i got all false except for the first one, which seemed true enough </p>