My experience at International Economics Olympiad (IEO) Qualifier Last Friday, state school #273 hosted the first qualifier for IEO. Both organization of it and the quality of the testing materials were horrid. Some of the MC questions had more than one answer, and some didn’t have any at all.
The participants were all told to come at 8 a.m. sharp, although there was no sign of any activity until about 9. Then, the organizers announced an opening ceremony right before the test (which lasted for about 40-50 minutes). Nothing interesting happened during the ceremony. After that, we went to the examination room and were all “delighted” to see that nothing was ready for the test. They spent another 30-40 minutes to ensure that no students from the same district sat nearby (yet the desks were close enough to see anything the person ahead of you wrote).
Finally, they started the test at 10:30 (two and a half hours later than supposed originally). They spent more time on ceremonies and preparations than the test itself (we had 1.5 hours to hand in the work).
“Professional” and “highly-trained” checkers made another dent in their reputation. Their team consisted of English and Economics teachers, but none of them knew the required terminology in English (none were qualified enough even to understand the test questions).
After receiving the results, I filed a formal appeal to test developers (which took me another 2-3 hours). The checkers promised to pass it to the developers at the beginning of this week. Today they said my appeal paper was lost, and I had to contact them earlier.
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@TimsTrail
