2010 Australian Chemistry Olympiad Team

After having a really enjoyable reunion with the students we had to say goodbye for a few more days and get back into helping them achieve the best they could. The first step in the process was marking their exams. We had the marking guide, more about we had coffee (or death in a cup for some) and got stuck into it. The details of that can be left out because it is hard to make marking exams sound exciting. So we can move on.

It was an early dinner before the 3rd jury meeting which was mostly to deal with administrative things such as new steering commitee and changes to the regulations and again this is hard to make exciting. Except to say that Mark and Will were the official vote counters while Anne and Tristan were left to be voters. A surprisingly short session of 2 hours and even though we got the Japanese marks we decided to leave it to morning as we weren’t arbitrating until the afternoon. Instead we all unwound with a really diverse collection of countries.

In the morning we compared our marks with the Japanese and decided on what we needed to arbitrate. We got reports from other countries that they Japanese were hard to get marks from so we were ready. Again we will keep this brief but just say we didn’t do as well as we would have liked.

But enough about us. The students got publicity. A very good picture of Cyril waiting to sit the theory exam but that was it. We haven’t heard more from them so we can assume all is well.

But that is all for now as according to the Americans it is quality over quantity when blogging (a dig at us, but really just their jealousy coming through).