Took me longer than usual
I had to straight guess on the last few just to finish
@MatthewW12 ok i see thx
@MatthewW12 Okay, makes sense.
Are we allowed to talk about the Open Exam now, since the window of testing has now passed?
No, the official final date is 2/18. Some schools get a 1 week extension, so we shouldn’t talk about it until 2/25
For those of you who took the test, are you planning to study or wait for the results?
Some of my thoughts after taking this exam yesterday (doesn’t feature any actual question content):
All practice exams I took resulted in high 20-mid 30 scores, which would generally pass cutoffs. On the 2010 open exam practice test I took, I got a 26 (and my understanding is that the 2010 exam was one of the hardest in recent memory).
THIS 2017 open exam was EXTREMELY difficult for me. My friends that took the exam with me here at one of the most competitive publics in the country all thought that they got less than 10 questions right. I would be incredibly appalled if the cutoff was above 20 this year. This exam was easily more difficult than any released practice exams and was certainly a time crunch as well (assuming one takes their time thinking through questions). Wording was incredibly tricky, question types were frustrating, and the distribution of content seemed slightly uneven.
Anyways, good luck to everyone. I recommend studying just so you don’t waste time (especially if you felt okay on the exam). Personally, I don’t think I have any shot at semifinalist… I already know so many questions I missed.
As it turns out, there were 2 tests this year. Version 1 was for week 1 and version 2 is for week 2 (from 13th to 18th). Version 2 is much more difficult than version 1 or any of the practice tests. Even my AP Bio teacher said he couldn’t answer some of the questions on the v2 test. I’m just hoping Cee uses different cut off scores for the 2 tests
That’s ridiculous. Why are they making it this hard? After all, it’s only the open exam. I’m taking the test tomorrow and I’m extremely worried about it. Is it even worth it to cram tonight?
@Anonymous1418 I often find the open exams trickier/harder than the semifinals for some reason
@y90y90 Hmm maybe it’s because the open exams are to weed out people and the semifinals is to test the knowledge of the top 10%
Now do you guys know about how it is scored especially for the multiple choice
Does this answer your question?
“Has NO Penalty for guessing. For multiple choice questions with more than one answer, the question value will be the number of wrong responses subtracted from the number of right responses with no question value below zero.”
-USABO Page
It helps … but it doesnt make sense bc you could put down all 5 and get .8 if there were 4 answers
Ok, so let’s say a question has 5 answers and 4 of them are right. Each right answer is worth 0.25, and each wrong answer is -0.25. If you put down all 5, you get 0.75. Let’s look at another one. There is a question that has 5 answers and 2 of them are right. Each right answer is worth 0.5 and each wrong answer is worth -0.5. If you get 2 right and 1 wrong, you will get 0.5.
Any other schools taking it after the 17th? I heard it was cuz of scantron errors, so some schools r taking it after the 17th.
Phew, taking this exam on the 17th. Mixed feelings since I’m not feeling the greatest this week. I will make it to Semifinals and my belief of that will only change when I am informed of my score. Good luck to the rest of you guys! You all seem to love bio too! =)
@KiaAfzali thanks for the clarification
Are we allowed to talk about the difficulty of the test?