Results

Overall
Answers
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From Results email Course setters Rick Lavine and Dick Detwiler

Attached is a summary of the results from RMA 2014. Thanks very much to the Flick Chicks (Cheryl Detwiler and Anne Schwartz) for helping me "grade" the question/answer sheets. We had 58 individuals or teams participate (up from 44 last year), with 108 total participants. And thanks to everyone who helped out, especially those who were competing and helping out with registration, which took time away from getting themselves ready to go out and getting their routes planned out. Don Winslow, Anne Schwartz, and Linda Kohn all worked on registration in spite of being within minutes of heading out.

The results summary shows, for each entrant, how many 1-pt questions they answered, how many 2-pt questions they answered, how many 1-pt questions were incorrect, and how many 2-pt questions were incorrect. Also, whether there were any penalties for being late. (Impressive job on time management by the 5-hour entrants, by the way! Lots of people finished barely within the deadline (5-10 minutes to spare), and very few were overtime.)

Also attached is the answer sheet.

For control 122, the sign that had had the names of the businesses went missing between the time when this control was vetted, and the day of the event. Anyone who went to this control and wrote anything down ("sign missing", or a guess at some other business's name that might have been somewhere on or near the building) got credit for this.

There were a couple of moderately common "issues" with a few other controls. I'll send something out later with further discussion about a few controls. The "judges" (Cheryl, Anne, and I) tried to be as reasonable as possible when scoring the sheets. If there was an answer that wasn't the "official" answer, but a moderate portion of the people came up with, we generally accepted that as correct, assuming logically that this meant that the question wasn't specific enough. If an answer was only semi-legible but we could sort of see that they were trying to write the correct answer, we were OK with that. We even accepted one where the correct answer was written but then crossed out (but no other answer written in). However, there was another one where the correct answer ("octagon") was crossed out and "hexagon" was written in -- sorry, we just couldn't accept that!

If anyone is interested in which specific questions they missed, let me know and I'll be glad to review your results.

Overall, only 2.1% of answers were incorrect, with the 3-hour people fairing better (1.4%, vs 2.4% of the 5-hour competitors).

Special congratulations go to Alison Crocker from Toledo, Ohio, who scored an amazing 84 points on foot in the 3-hour category. This was more than double the 2nd place foot finisher, and also far ahead of anyone who did the 3-hour on a bike. For those who may not know, Alison is the top US woman orienteering (both on foot, and on XC skis). Hopefully Ali won't mind me including a link about a recent article about her from the Toledo paper, for the benefit of those who may not be familiar with her:

Also, congratulations to the people on bikes who got to all of the controls, or nearly all of the controls, something I really hadn't thought would happen. I figured that covering the distance to get to all of the controls might not be a real major challenge, but when factoring in the time needed to read the question, find the answer, and write it down, for 125 controls, that was very unlikely to happen in 5 hours. Sergey Dobretsov got to all of the controls (with only 2 wrong answers); Peter Gagarin got to all except for 5, and the team of multi-sport ultra athletes and adventure racers Jason Urkfitz and Rich Furstoss got to all except for 4.