Tiny bit of feedback on Fermi scoring. The Science Olympiad rules appear to get logarithmic rounding wrong.
Generally, fives can round either way, depending on if you think your answer is high or low.
When dealing with orders of magnitude, the centerpoint for rounding should be halfway between the two values, except in this case the value is the exponent, not the mantissa/​coefficient. This means that halfway is sqrt(10) = 3.16
So in general, values of 3 or lower should be rounded down and values much higher than 3 (even 3.4) should be rounded up.
This document is awesome.
Tiny bit of feedback on Fermi scoring. The Science Olympiad rules appear to get logarithmic rounding wrong.
When dealing with orders of magnitude, the centerpoint for rounding should be halfway between the two values, except in this case the value is the exponent, not the mantissa/​coefficient. This means that halfway is sqrt(10) = 3.16
So in general, values of 3 or lower should be rounded down and values much higher than 3 (even 3.4) should be rounded up.
3.68 x 10^3 ~= 10^4