[2019 ARML] - Practice on *Saturday* this weekend!

Hi everyone,

Our next practice will be this Saturday, 2pm-5pm in Palo Alto, at Room H1, Cubberley Community Center. You can find more information about practice at the practice website: https://math.berkeley.edu/~moorxu/2019ARML/.

At the practice website, you can also find a spreadsheet that I've set up to help organize carpools to practice. You can post your information there, and contact others who might want to carpool to practice.

Practice materials from past practices can also be found at the practice website, with the following username and password:
Username: sfba
Password: arml

As always, if you need to miss a practice, please make sure that you fill out the Practice Absence Form on the practice website *before* practice, with a good reason.

As an additional reminder, you can submit your notarized permission slips at practice.

If you ever miss any announcements, you can view our email archive.

Finally, Freya has written up some tips from last practice, and I've included them below. :) 

Best,
Moor

---------------------------------------------

Lastly, here are some pointers based on what I saw last practice. I know I only got the chance to work with some of you then, but I'm posting the tips here because they apply to everyone, not just my group :)

- When selecting problems at the beginning of the team round, make sure that every problem has AT LEAST ONE PERSON working on it, especially if that problem is in the first half of the test. In general, it's good to have 1-2 people working on each problem from the beginning. 

- As soon as there are conflicting answers to a team round problem, the boardmaster (who records the answers on the board) should IMMEDIATELY and LOUDLY call out the conflict and make sure the people who came up with the conflicting answers work together to resolve the conflict. A conflict should not be sitting on the board for more than a few seconds before it is getting resolved. If the boardmaster has not called out the conflict, one of the other team members should check the board and call it out (so everyone should be monitoring the board throughout the test, not just the boardmaster).

- When you call out a problem to work on, make sure the boardmaster has recorded your *correct* initials on the *correct* problem. If your initials are not recorded or recorded incorrectly after a few seconds, CALL THEM OUT AGAIN LOUDLY. Do NOT wait until you got your answer for the boardmaster to record what you've been working on. It is crucial that the team knows what you're working on at all times.

- Remember that team round answers must be recorded *on a separate sheet of paper* to be graded. Thus, at the 1-minute warning, the boardmaster should copy down all answers ON A SEPARATE SHEET OF PAPER for grading. (If the boardmaster forgets, it is the responsibility of the rest of the team to remind them or copy down the answers themselves.) In addition, have at least one other team member VERIFY that the answers on the separate sheet of paper have been copied down correctly. It'd be a shame to miss problems due to mistranscription!

- This should go without saying, but NO TALKING DURING THE RELAYS. The team will get disqualified for talking during the relays (and individual round). While this has never been a problem during the contest, it has been a recurrent problem during practices, and we should practice in the same way that we would in the real contest.

- DO NOT SUBMIT THE SAME RELAY ANSWER TWICE AT THE 3- AND 6-MINUTE MARKS. You are only graded based on your latest submission. So, if you submit the same (correct) answer that you submitted at 3 minutes at 6 minutes, you will cost your team 2 points. Don't do that.

- That said, ALWAYS SUBMIT SOMETHING AT 3 MINUTES, even if you are almost certain it's wrong. There's no penalty for submitting an answer at 3 minutes, so submit something; there's a chance that any answer you submit might be correct, but there's no chance that a blank (or lack of) submission is correct!