The Quizbowl Resource Center

Corry

If this actually happens on January 10, Amherst will send a team (me and Boyang Jiao). Seriously. Neither of us can attend the MIT mirror of DEES this month, but we're both going to be back in California until past mid-January for winter break. This sounds fun.

Corry

I haven't thoroughly read through the set, but one thing I remember in particular was the tossup on Tiananmen Square. The first line said that "this location" displayed a statement claiming that a man was "30% right and 70% wrong". I'm assuming this clue refers to Democracy Wall,...

Corry

It's not that subjective and this is dumb. Yes, the Chicago question is much harder; the fact that a very widely read piece published in MAY TWENTY-FOURTEEN doesn't show up means literally nothing. Reverse clue lookup is a poor way to judge clue difficulty (especially with any current events clue!)...

Corry

I didn't write either question, and may have a weird knowledge base, but I really don't see why the second question is so self-evidently harder than the first. Well I guess judging difficulty is a pretty subjective process, but I'll give it a shot, through reverse clue lookup. For this, I'll be usi...

Corry

To illustrate what I'm saying: Here's a tossup in Packet 11 on Napoleon's invasion of Russia, which I felt was very difficulty appropriate. I actually like this question quite a bit: although the first line was really really hard (like most of the first lines in this set), there are quite a few buzz...

Corry

Thanks for taking the time and effort to post that, Jason. I agree with many of your criticisms of the set and we have worked on fixing the errors and toning down the hard parts. I will say that, in general, I find criticism of the placement of power markings a bit inane and not super helpful. That...

Corry

The SoCal field for this set was gutted, with the first place team (Arcadia A) missing their science specialist, but I still find cause for concern when North Hollywood, a team that averaged 23.5 on several NAQT IS-sets last year with the same lineup, only scored 21.06 PPB on this set. Keep in mind...

Corry

UlyssesInvictus wrote:Also, I'd bet money that way more people know who he is in qb from Rick and Morty than by studying film theory...

I am this person.

Corry

Could I see the Elgin Marbles tossup? I remember it sounding somewhat transparent.

Corry

Will, I thought your history questions were, for the most part, really creative and interesting. However, there were a few ideas that just didn't work. The Tanzimat reforms tossup definitely falls into this category--that answer is both too hard for regular difficulty and almost impossible to execu...

Corry

Oh, speaking of that Russian myth answerline, I'd consider swapping Slavic to be the main answerline and Russians as an acceptable answerline--when you say "these peoples," that made me think you wanted Slavs, and there was a tense few seconds while the mod figured out if Slav was accepta...

Corry

Can I see the Nuwa, Mexico, and Jormungandr tossups? The choice of Nuwa as an answerline seems inordinately hard, and the ox-head clue for Jormungandr seemed way too early considering how famous the Thor fishing story is. I agree that some of the tossups were far too transparent: I buzzed on a wild...

Corry

I liked your questions (as usual, I guess?). There were a few history tossups in this set that I found rather uninteresting to play, since they involved a lot of incoherent name-dropping and lack of description, but all of the history questions that you wrote were quite easy to listen to. Some thoug...

Corry

By the way, do you know what the "Hawaiian Islands" tossup was classified as, if not geography? Because it was really really hard. Earth Science. Well, I guess that makes sense. I knew about Kure and the Darwin Point from a geography perspective, in which it's super super obscure, but I'm...

Corry

By the way, do you know what the "Hawaiian Islands" tossup was classified as, if not geography? Because it was really really hard.

Corry

I really liked most of these questions, because I would've powered most of these questions (obviously the perfect standard). Like Jacob mentioned, the clue on Julian Castro is repeated in both the "housing" tossup and the "Secretary of Housing" tossup. That should probably be fix...

Corry

Will this set have powers?

Corry

Hey, I know it's really hard to come up with stuff to fill, say, a 1/1 math distro. That just means you should try extra hard to come up with good answers to make people think 1/1 math is doable. That doesn't mean it's a good idea to reach into the olympiad rabbit-hole and pull out redacted terribl...

Corry

My brother Kevin and I read this tournament while on a road trip this summer. 2. The science seemed to have entirely too much conceptual math for my tastes. I might be biased in that I don't like it, but a lot of other people at our site and other sites too felt there was a lot of math. What did oth...

Corry

Dr. Loki Skylizard, Thoracic Surgeon wrote:http://hsqbrank.com/2014/08/27/2014-15- ... -seveteen/

Actually, Canyon Crest Academy only graduates one top scorer, Oliver. Varkey is a sophomore and Nathan is a junior this year.

Corry

I don't know anything about philosophy, but my brother who actually knows things tells me that Godel is "wow crap so hard" for regular high school schoolers. The end conversion rates for tossups on Godel would probably be pretty high since everybody would just buzz on "this dude's inc...

Corry

add .5/.5 to geo: too much geo? maybe it's just me, but it seems that the set would get harder not easier if we took out psych which people can and do take a class for (this argument also works to a lesser extent for econ) and replaced it with geo which is really not offered as a class/not taught e...

Corry

Are astronomy and earth science the "strike zone of 'what non-elite teams can answer'"? I know that my team has trouble even getting 10s on both of those subjects While I think the math distro is pretty low for a high school set (and the comp sci a little high) I don't think that replacin...

Corry

A quick search on the NAQT writer's database reveals about 30 questions mentioning the Chimney Rock in Nebraska, and 1 question mentioning a Chimney Rock anywhere else (take a wild guess as to which question that is). Yes, technically there is nothing wrong the Colorado question, because it makes cl...

Corry

I can't get the Study feature to work with bonuses. I input that I want 5 bonuses of any high school difficulty, and I get 5 high school tossups instead. Thank you for working on this great database! I'll be adding this along with the interface mode fix sometime later this week. It seems like Inter...

Corry

Smooth coarea formula wrote:A Civ V game on standard speed should take 5 hours at most.

That seems overly optimistic. Maybe it's faster in multiplayer, but I just spent 7 hours yesterday playing a Civ 5 game at quick speed (emperor level, 6 civilizations, standard continent-size map).

Corry

This is just best hope, if you want to run everything on Chromebooks: http://play.freeciv.org/ It's an open-source version of Civilization II that can run on internet browsers.

Which is a shame, because Civilization V: Brave New World is the bomb.

Corry

Hey, thanks for doing this. I've always been a big fan of NAQT's public releasing of conversion stats, and I think this is a really good step for PACE to do too.

Corry

As a somewhat unrelated side comment, do any tournaments track question conversion stats besides NAQT? That's always been one of my favorite things about writing for NAQT; otherwise, it seems to me that there's really no reliable way of determining the difficulty of any particular question.

Corry

Corry, I completely agree that many things about NASAT this year were far too difficult (for ACF Regionals level), and maybe even this question, but I don't think that this in particular is reasonable. We have plenty of examples of people on this board who have done well at e.g. science olympiads t...

Corry

HOWEVAH, my point in making this post is that "these clues weren't on Wikipedia or the first page of Google results" is an astoundingly poor justification for your otherwise-correct argument. NASAT's never been shy about being an ACF Regionals-level tournament, and while it sometimes gets...

Corry

Some of the bonuses are rather oddly connected. For instance, the Belarus bonus is rather funky: the first clue about Operation Bagration doesn't really have anything to do with Lukashenko, but rather refers only to Belarus (sort of-- Operation Bagration is actually associated with a bunch of differ...

Corry

bird bird bird bird bird wrote:Yes, it is.

Cool. Is it available publicly yet?

Corry

So, is the entering freshman list still a thing this year?

Corry

FYI, I'm definitely going these practices, beginning this week. Hopefully I'll be able to bum a ride from Jason/Kahao (the tables have turned).

Corry

Is there any chance you can make the color scheme simpler? The old color scheme was fine, but with this one I think there are too many colors and it makes the text hard to read + it hurts the eyes. User was reminded to enable a signature --Mgmt. I agree. The main purpose of the site is readability,...

Corry

Could I see the conversion stats for the Gupta Empire, Carbonari, Measure for Measure, XYZ Affair, Italy, and Khyber Pass? Also, what were the specific stats for Chapultepec, mantle plumes, and Satyricon?

Corry

I would actually be suprised if Michael Romanov wasn't powered in many rooms in that stage of the playoffs. Michael Romanov has been established in the high school canon, especially in History Bowl, and the clues from the beginning are all pretty much what is repeated in every Michael Romanov quest...

Corry

I wrote things for this. If you had feedback, post here or PM me. [2] Newfoundland, Bangladesh/East Timor/Aceh [5] Baffin Bay/Davis Strait/marginal sea [6] Greenland, Edward III [7] Gingrich [8] Restoration/Charles II/Dec. of Breda [10] 2048 [11] Thurmond [12] "Dewey Defeats Truman" [15] ...

Corry

Unfortunately, I don't believe there are any others.

Corry

Schmidt Sting Pain Index wrote:I really liked the Geo tossups especially Charlotte Amalie...

You are a geography god.

Corry

I also feel like tossing up Malcolm Gladwell is a bit of a stretch for HSNCT, but I have a less clear idea of how that tossup went over in Saturday play. I wrote this tossup. I wasn't sure about it at first, but I felt more comfortable tossing it up after I found out that other tossups on Gladwell ...

Corry

I finally did a quick read-through of the whole HSNCT. As usual, I liked most of the set (or at least, most of the history that I didn't write myself). However, also as usual, there were a few tossups answer lines that just struck me as somewhat ill-considered. Regarding this, I have a question abou...

Corry

Some observations: I think a tossup on Buenos Aires shouldn't have the big avenue as its lead-in. I thought the Chiang Kai-shek tossup was a little too easy. I wrote these 2 tossups. In response: 1. I didn't know that the Avenida Nueve de Julio was particularly known. I'll wait for HSNCT conversion...

Corry

27: Hotel California TU* The first line of this tossup seemed quite easy to me. In my mind, "we haven't had that spirit here since 1969" is actually one of the most recognizable quotes of the entire song Hotel California, on par with the lines in the actual chorus ("such a lovely pla...

Corry

I wrote a boatload of history and geography questions for this tournament, including a few questions that I suspect were probably bad ideas. If you think any of the following tossups were a "bad idea", please tell me: Ulysses S. Grant Haiti Democratic Republic of Congo Estonia Kazakhstan p...

Corry

I powermarked this question here: This figure drove out thieves from his father’s temple and had citizens place palm leaves when he rode on a donkey. He fed thousands with 5 loaves of bread (*) and 2 pieces of fish and preached the story of the Prodigal Son. For 10 points, name this central figure ...

Corry

New SoCal players:
- Yuqiao Zhao from Arcadia
- Austin Mendoza from Madison

Corry

Ok, I have wrangled a bunch of SoCal people into this, as follows:

- Kevin Li from Westview
- DoWon Kim from Torrey Pines
- Vincent Doehr from La Jolla

Possibly more to come.

Corry

I will play this. I'll probably make a team once I can drag enough other SoCal players into this. Also, I will write questions because I have infinite free time right now.

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