The Quizbowl Resource Center

There will not be a podcast.

What? – This poll is meant to rank, in order, the top 25 HS teams in the country before HSNCT starts. It is peer-driven.

How? – If you’d like to participate then send me your ballot at waddle2357[AT]gmail[DOT]com. Please format your ballot in such a way that I can easily tell who you think the number one team is, the number two is, the number three team is etc. If you don’t I will get angry at you and demand a new ballot.

Who? – YOU!

When? – You have two weeks plus a little to cull together a top 25 ballot. This means that voting closes on May 20th. Ready! Set! GO!

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I edit my ballot once it is submitted? –Yes, yes you may, as long as it is before the deadline. If it is a minor change then just email a short explanation of what you want changed. If it is a major change then just submit an entirely new ballot with a little note reminding me to delete your old one.

Can my ballot be rejected? – Yes, yes it can. If you submit a highly questionable or incomplete ballot, then I reserve the right to reject it. Fear not though, I will ask for clarification before doing so, and, if you can provide a reasonably intelligent rationale for your rankings or complete your ballot, then I will feel compelled to accept it!

If you have any other questions, then feel free to email me with them (provided that they aren’t about who you should rank where and what not) or post here.

Ballots for the postseason collegiate poll are now open. They will be due Friday, May 10, at noon.

Please rank 25 collegiate teams (not high school). The criteria is something like the midseason poll–comparing the teams on nationals-level difficulty questions, with the logical realization that now we have more data, including many rounds in which teams did play each other on nationals-level difficulty. I don’t expect or require people to just slavishly copy or average teams’ finishes at ICT/Nats, but I would also obviously encourage some logical analysis of those results and not just sending in a midseason balllot again.

You can vote for any team that has played a regular season collegiate tournament all year, with the caveat that if you want to ignore (for lack of data) or penalize teams that did not play either nationals, I cannot stop you from doing so.

Please look over your ballots before sending it in to make sure you are ranking all the teams you wish to rank.

Here are the results. There were a very impressive 35 ballots received.

Voters: Evan Adams, Mirza Ahmed, William Alston, Bryan Berend, George Berry, Matt Bollinger, Max Bucher, Billy Busse, William Butler, Bryce Durgin, Zach Foster, Auroni Gupta, Andrew Hart, Matt Hayes, Isaac Hirsch, Daniel Hothem, Matt Jackson, Nick Jensen, Tanay Kothari, Jasper Lee, Stephen Liu, Saajid Moyen, Will Nediger, Joe Nutter, Jacob O’Rourke, Cameron Orth, Jordan Palmer, Ryan Rosenberg, David Seal, Adam Sperber, Marshall Steinbaum, Jake Sundberg, Matt Weiner, Richard Yu, and Libo Zeng

A quick word. The results are certainly far-ranging, but I tried to take a fairly generous stance regarding the acceptance of ballots. If an obvious top #6 type team was missing, I made an inquiry and I allowed people to revise ballots, but in general this poll reflects sincere opinions of voters. There are obvious regional biases, eccentric opinions, and odd picks, yet these cannot be ascribed to just a handful of ballots–almost every ballot had something that made it stand out from the others, which is what makes this exciting. All of the ballots did properly rank 25 teams.

I will post overall point totals and then the highest and lowest rankings they received on a ballot. If there is no lowest, it means that they were unranked on at least one ballot.

#1: Virginia A (873, highest: #1, lowest: #3)
#2: Penn (825, highest: #2, lowest: #5)
#3: Yale A (796, highest: #1, lowest: #5)
#4: Michigan A (758, highest: #2, lowest: #11)
#5: Illinois (756, highest: #2, lowest: #7)
#6: Chicago A (679, highest: #4, lowest: #10)
#7: Maryland A (654, highest: #5, lowest: #11)
#8: Minnesota (592, highest: #6, lowest: #20)
#9: Georgia Tech (571, highest: #6, lowest: #14)
#10: Harvard A (557, highest: #5, lowest: #17)
#11: Brown A (486, highest: #8, lowest: #23)
#12: Chicago B (441, highest: #7)
#13: MIT (360, highest: #8)
#14: NYU (307, highest: #9)
#15: Ohio State (304, highest: #8)
#16: Alabama (293, highest: #9)
#17: Columbia (230, highest: #8)
#18: Rice (224, highest: #10)
#19: Michigan State (222, highest: #12)
#20: Alberta (215, highest: #7)
#21: Berkeley (205, highest: #9)
#22: MCTC (180, highest: #9)
#23: Virginia B (139, highest: #9)
#24: Stanford (129, highest: #10)
#25: Dartmouth (128, highest: #14)

Also Receiving Votes:
VCU (83), Kings College (76), Yale B (68), Northwestern (55), WUSTL (40), Cornell (35), North Carolina (20), Brown B (13), Carleton College (10), Chipola (10), Michigan B (8), South Carolina (8), Wisconsin (5), Chicago C (4), Maryland B (3), UCSD (3), George Mason (2), Oxford (2), Valencia (2), Harvard B (1), and Ottawa (1).

This is the official announcement for the collegiate poll, late midseason edition. As explained by Matt Weiner, in the future there will be four of these–preseason, after the fall semester, after SCT/Regionals, and postseason (after the national tournaments). This year, there will only be the SCT/Regionals and postseason polls.

Here are the general guidelines:

1. Fill out a ballot, ranking the top 25 (1 to 25) collegiate teams. You must rank at least 25 teams. No incomplete ballots will be counted.

2. Send the ballots via e-mail to me (chey0004 AT umn DOT edu). I will not accept any ballots sent prior to ACF Regionals completion. I will not count any ballots that are just posted here and in fact I would strongly, strongly urge you not to publicly post your ballots in this thread.

3. You may vote for any collegiate team and any B/C/D team, what have you. Please take some time to be informed about actual B/C team composition (i.e., many teams throughout the year mix up their starting A rosters, so don’t be fooled by a particularly strong Michigan B performance if Kurtis is playing on that team, etc.). You may not vote for high school teams. Anyone sending in a ballot that has voted for a high school team will be asked to submit a new ballot. You may vote for community colleges.

4. While I can’t force you to adopt a particular voting philosophy, I think Matt Weiner’s conception that you are “voting for how this team, at best possible strength, would do at ICT and Nationals.” If you think a team would do better at one tournament than the other, than weigh that into your votes. What this means is that you are assuming these teams are playing on hard, Nationals/ICT-level questions, and that you cannot take considerations like “Oh, Team X isn’t playing ICT, I’ll move them down a spot.” Assume everyone is playing and assume they are at full strength. By full strength, I interpret it to mean “the best team they actually played this year.” For example, I’ve played on Minnesota teams this year, but will not be playing ACF Nationals–rank Minnesota as if I were to be playing. On the other hand, Andy Watkins (I think) is at NYU but hasn’t played anything for them all year–do not rank Hypothetical Teams. Please do not vote for schools that haven’t played any tournaments all year–if some basically retired player is at a school, do not vote for that school just because (I can’t think of any offhand, but you know what I mean). On the other hand, you may also vote for effectively one-man teams that did compete at actual tournaments (Georgetown, MCTC) if you believe they fit the criteria for Top 25.

5. Any bizarre ballots will either be rejected or I will ask for some explanation/logic. What I mean by bizarre is just completely ignoring any results that have happened so far and would include: intentionally ignoring a team whose results have suggested they are a major contender (for example, not ranking or ranking very low teams like Penn, Michigan, Virginia), overranking teams based on “gut feelings” (Minnesota is a good team but there is nothing to suggest they are a top 3 team), and overrranking B or C teams based on unsophisticated analysis of the data.

5. Ballots will never be released. I will list the names of the people who vote unless people have a problem with this.

6. Finally, I would encourage all voters to take a little time in drafting a ballot, and especially to look beyond your own geographical region. I would especially urge voters in the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic, and East (where the majority of voters will probably come from) to review the performances of teams in the South, West Coast, Canada, and Southwest.

If anyone has any questions on voting, eligibility guidelines, etc., please post or e-mail.

Ballots are due a week from tomorrow, March 4, 2013.

Congratulations to the Ladue Horton Watkins HS A team for being ranked number 1 in the 2012-13 HSQB Mid-Season Poll! Ladue’s A team recieved 10 of the 16 first place votes. Dorman A (SC – 2 first place votes), LASA A (TX – 1 first place votes), Bellarmine A (CA – 2 first place votes), and St. John’s A (TX – 0 first place votes) rounded out the top 5. Cistercian (TX) received the remaining first place vote. LASA B was the only B team to be voted into the Top 25. Three top 10 teams: Bellarmine (2 ballots), Loyola (2 ballot) and Cistercian (1 ballot) were left of a ballot. Ballots were submitted by: Myself, Jacob Reed, Morgan Venkus, Rohan Nag, Max Schindler/Siddhant, Richard Yu, Scott Blish, Sameen Bal, Ian Drayer’s Computers, Sam Deutsch, Collin Parks, Thomas Gaddy, Nicholas Wawrykow, Nathan Weiser, Vimal Konduri, and Adam Kalinch.

HSQB Mid-Season Top 25
1. Ladue A (MO) – 391 pts.
2. Dorman A (SC) – 370 pts.
3. LASA A (TX) – 347 pts.
4. Bellarmine A (CA) – 333 pts.
5. St. John’s A (TX) – 326 pts.
6. DCC A (MI) – 305 pts.
7. Cistercian A (TX) – 285 pts.
8. Loyola A (IL) – 256 pts.
9. IMSA A (IL) – 248 pts.
10. Blair A (MD) – 240 pts.
11. LASA B (TX) – 210 pts.
12. Thomas Jefferson A (VA) – 195 pts.
13. Belvidere North A (IL) – 193 pts.
14. Richard Montgomery A (MD) – 192 pts.
15. Hunter A (NY) – 185 pts.
16. East Chapel Hill A (NC) – 152 pts.
17. Maggie Walker A (VA) – 148 pts.
18. Macomb A (IL) – 117 pts.
19. Northmont A (OH) – 98 pts.
20. Arcadia A (CA) – 86 pts.
21. DCD A (MI) – 84 pts.
22. Early College at Guilford A (NC) – 66 pts.
23. Wilmington Charter A (DE) – 50 pts.
24. Chattahoochee A (GA) – 43 pts.
25. Wayzata A (MN) – 34 pts.

Ballots can be found here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc … xNnc#gid=0

[Cross-posted from the forums: http://hsquizbowl.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&p=254373#p254373]

Congratulations to the “A” team from Hunter College High School (New York, New York) for finishing first in the 2011-12 Mid-Season Poll.  Hunter captured 12 of 15 first place votes, with two of the remaining three going to Centennial High School (Roswell, Georgia) and the remaining vote going to Bellarmine College Preparatory (San Jose, California).  Auburn High School (Rockford, Illinois) and the Illinois Math and Science Academy (Aurora, Illinois) rounded out the top five. Read the rest of this entry »

Congratulations to ACF Nationals Champion Stanford University for their first place finish in the 2009-2010 Post-Season Collegiate Poll, after receiving four out of a possible nine first place votes. In second place, also with four first place votes was the University of Minnesota. Third place was taken by Chicago A. The remaining first place vote was taken by ICT Champion Harvard University. Overall, thirty-seven teams received votes off of nine ballots.

Read the rest of this entry »

Congratulations to the University of Minnesota for their first place finish in the 2009-2010 Late-Season Collegiate Poll, after receiving six out of a possible thirteen first place votes. In second place, with three first place votes was the University of Chicago. Third place was taken by Brown A, with two  first place votes. The remaining two first place votes were taken by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Overall, forty teams received votes off of thirteen ballots. Read the rest of this entry »

With the completion of ACF Regionals and NAQT Sectionals, it is now time for the 2010 Late Season Collegiate* Poll.

* “Collegiate” refers to the level of play and difficulty of tournaments to consider, not that the poll is exclusive to teams from colleges. If you believe a high school team is good enough to be ranked here, rank them.

Send to me your top 25 in order, 1 to 25. Teams will get 25 points for a 1st place vote, 24 for 2nd, and so on.

Email them to me at georgeberry292@hotmail.com, and please include “hsquizbowl Top 25″ in the subject line of your email. I have started to accept ballots and will accept ballots until the end of next Tuesday, March 9th.

Ballots that are bad will be reviewed and possibly rejected; if I have enough time, I’ll prompt you for reasoning and what not.

Remember that the poll is intended for a general ranking of how good teams are. You should consider the team’s best possible performance, as if all players who have shown up this year were available for play. B teams and the like are eligible to be ranked.

Congratulations to State College Area High School (State College, Pennsylvania) for finishing first in the 2009-10 mid-season high school quiz bowl poll. With 18 ballots received, State College  received the first place vote on 17.5 of them. Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School for Government and International Studies’ A team (Richmond, Virginia) finished second and received the other half- first place vote. Southside High School (Greenville, South Carolina),Paul M. Dorman High School’s A team (Roebuck, South Carolina), and  Georgetown Day School’s A Team (Washington, DC) round out the top five. Congratulations to these teams and to all 48 teams that received votes. Complete results are after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »