Why the IPT matters
Before going into depth about what should be changed in the IPT's current format, we wanted to remind ourselves a few points of why we did this analysis work and why we think the tournament matters :
- Amazing way to do science
- Learning to present scientific results to a community
- Interaction during the preparation between students and researchers
- Interaction between teams during the tournament
- Great depth of view of what research can be
It is for all these reasons that we should all want to make the IPT better.
On multiple participations at the IPT
At the International Physicists' Tournament, we encountered a certain number of students that have already participated in the tournament multiple times. As everyone points out (for good reasons) the amazing pedagogy of the tournament, we believe that the largest number of students should be allowed to participate in the tournament.
Although we understand that it might be difficult for some universities to recruit enough motivated students in order to prepare the IPT, we believe the tournament should encourage each team to renew its members every year.
On the late preparation of problems and the difficulty to prepare them
While at the IPT we had to face a point : very few teams had more than seven problems prepared (only us to our knowledge), out of the thirteen that would be needed to protect themselves from degrading their coefficients. While this was shown through the reduction of the multiplicative coefficients during the selection fights we believe that this reveals a problem with the IPT : there are too many problems.
We believe that the tournament having too many problems is a bad thing for different reasons :
- Some teams (including us) finish their presentations or even do the problems during the tournament's week. As a result, very little time is given to students to deeply understand each problem and they sometimes come out and present fals results and conclusions that we devised the night before.
- Teams who have less means and time to prepare are stressed and frustrated. Therefore, they sometimes come out and present fallacious results (while sometimes knowing it) in order not to show that they have very few problems prepared.
Reducing the number of problems (and getting them right)
The first question should be : Why is there 17 problems anyway ?
On sensational results
As the IPT is a tournament, every teams that participates wants to win. However, we believe the main aim of the tournament is
- A finale where you put back to zero all grades will inevitably increase this competition spirit, leading to more sensational but erroneous results.
What signal does the IOC want to send to teams ?
On the correlation between grades
At the French Physicists' Tournament
Using python web scrapping code, we were able to retrieve the grades of each fight. We do not discriminate on any parameter (judge, team etc.), the data is "anonymized" and we only know the link between the grades of reporter, opponent and reviewer.
Plotting the distribution of grades for both the Reporter and the Opponent
Data plotted in Figure \ref{166998}.