Rules – Process Control Event
2025 – London
The process control event for the 2025 Operations Challenge is going to comprise of two components – a process control written exam challenge, and a process simulation challenge. General rules for the written exam component are the same as last year’s. The exam content, general layout, and scoring will be essentially unchanged from previous years. Details pertaining to the written exam portion are described in Sections II, III and IV. Details pertaining to the process simulation portion are described in Sections V and VI.
I. OVERVIEW AND EVENT PHILOSOPHY
The purpose of the Process Control Event is to distinguish the relative process control skills of the teams competing so that points can be awarded proportionately. Unlike most challenge situations, it is not expected that all teams will complete the entire exam, finish answering all questions, or tackle every simulation challenge. The goal of this event is not to see who can answer all questions with the fewest mistakes. Instead, teams are given the opportunity to provide as many correct answers as they can in an allotted period of time. The written exam and the process simulations are designed to be long enough so that teams do not run out of questions to answer and tasks to achieve.
The types of questions and their difficulty level are roughly matched to the points awarded for getting the correct answer. Since the written exam component is designed to include different types of questions (for example, simple multiple choice questions versus more complex scenario questions), solving the more complex questions will be worth more than the simpler multiple choice questions. It is then up to each team to develop a strategy to figure out which questions to answer in the time allotted to achieve the highest final score.
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