NSMQ: Prempeh College’s Protest Disallowed
The Managing Director of the Prime Time Limited, organisers of the National Science and Maths Quiz (NSMQ), Nana Akua Mensah-Bonsu has disallowed the protest by Prempeh College over the semi-final results of this year’s contest.
In a letter, the five-time winners were rebuked for stating that they have been enduring “missteps and miscalculations on the part of the organisers” which has affected their interests for years.
The statement, organisers believe smacks and smears the reputation of the competition and underestimates the “great effort and investment of time and money that the contestants and trainers put into preparing their teams to excel at this competition.”
“We would like to reiterate that Primetime has no interest whatsoever, in which school wins, or loses a contest, or, ultimately, the championship trophy. We place a very high premium on the integrity of the programme and so go to great lengths, too numerous to recount here, to protect it,” they noted.
Protest
The Kumasi-based second cycle institution was in the semifinals with Opoku Ware Senior High School (OWASS) and Pope John Senior High School & Minor Seminary but failed to advance after garnering 36 points, two points behind OWASS who qualified for the next round.
In a letter addressed to Primetime Limited on October 19, Prempeh College’s NSMQ Team coordinators disputed the answer to a riddle in the fifth round of the competition and called for a review and acceptance of their contestant’s answer.
The riddle read, “I am a physical principle. Even though there is no theoretical basis for me, I am an experimentally confirmed principle. I operate across many domains of physics including mechanics, electromagnetism, and even quantum mechanics. According to me, the whole is equal to the sum of the parts. You call on me whenever you determine the electric field or the scalar potential at a point due to a collection of stationary charges So, who am I?”
Prempeh College answered with “superposition,” but the consultant claimed that different types of superposition existed and that the answer should have been “linear superposition.”
However, Prempeh College’s quiz team coordinators argued in their letter, citing Britannica and other sources, that “superposition” and “linear superposition” can be used interchangeably. They maintained that the student’s answer was correct.
Disallowance
In their response to the petition, Prime Time argued that clues to the riddle pointed to the linear superposition principle with no reference to exponential superposition.
“The clues in the riddle in question were intended to prompt the specific response ‘(Principle of) Linear Superposition’ and enough was given. The claim that no clue restricts the answer to linear superposition is not supported by clues 4 and 5.
“Specifically, the examples given in the last clue, namely, electric field and scalar potential calculations as practised by SHS students, point directly to linear superposition. Electric circuits constitute a topic under electromagnetism, one of the examples given in clue 3. However, nonlinear electric circuits and devices are well-known, so it is not clear how a specific reference to electric circuits would restrict the answer to linear superposition. The clarity sought by the protesters in their letter is given on the last page of their document, where the principle of linear superposition as a linear combination is explained.”
It added, “The Quiz Mistress exercises discretion on whether an answer provided by a contestant is sufficiently responsive and would have accepted the answer given by the Prempeh College contestants if, in her professional opinion, the target key and the answer given by the contestants were synonymous.”
It, therefore, upheld the results of the stage.
