The Quizbowl Resource Center

Scaled Flowerpiercer

I just want to mention that I am not sure how true the "dwindling in popularity" thing is. Not counting formats that don't have negs, 3 out of the 4 tournaments in the NY/NJ area that Irvington has attended this year gave out neg prizes. (and the fourth, Half Hollow Hills, didn't give any ...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

I don't usually like to do neg prizes in high school. One reason is that while in college, I think for the most part, neg prizes go to very good players who happen to be playing aggressively (and this is true in high school most of the time), at a lot of high school tournaments I've run, there are ...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Irvington will be able to come with 1 team, 3 buzzers and 0 coaches/moderators of any sort. (The registration form said the deadline was today...if that is not a hard deadline, a second team may be brought depending upon what we find once our Spring Break is over)

Scaled Flowerpiercer

It's always hard to say "subject area X is harder than Y" because blah blah blah, as, especially in High School, this depends upon the school's own strengths. For example, my team is great at history and ok at science, but absolutely atrocious at Lit. (The fact that we were assigned only 1...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

This is kind of an interesting point. My general policy for giveaways (for HS questions and most easy college tournaments anyway) is to give the easiest clue without resorting to stupid tricks ('rhymes with..."; "shares his name with...") or literal "say back what I just said&qu...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

I feel like it is a bit too common for the giveaway of tossups to have a "curved yellow fruit" feel, where pretty much the question becomes not even "do you know anything about this?" but more so "do you know that this is a thing?" Most of the giveaways that come to min...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

One thing you might want to try if you find a lack of interest: Flip the usual order, and have some success before building a foundation. Success tends to get people interested in joining up. Unfortunately, there's a possibility that still no one will be interested, and it's hard to get success unl...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

I plan on attending Williams College next year and likely playing quizbowl there.

Scaled Flowerpiercer

I find often the subject matter can be more prohibitive than the question format to new teams, tossups of any length about asian lit or fine arts are scarier than the longest tossup on George Washington or Skyrim or Cellular Respiration.

Scaled Flowerpiercer

I don't see any reason why we need bad questions in order to attract new players. I don't see why we need bad questions either, but Dave has legitimate points. While some of the house-written History Bowl questions may have been "bad," the vast majority were both good and pyramidal, but s...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

A lot of things said here have to do with how to view quizbowl and how to begin to study if one want to take it seriously, but I have found that it can be very hard to get students to take quizbowl seriously and put in any effort to study. Only 1 member of our team besides myself does any quizbowl-s...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

This might be a kind of silly thing to bring up, but I have noticed that NHBB's name has often confused me a little bit when trying to refer to the organization or the national tournament. The name National History Bee and Bowl seems to be used both for the organization and thus the regional tournam...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

ProfessorIanDuncan wrote:
Irvington is also expressing tentative interest,
Unfortunately Irvington can't come because some local tournament dates got switched and now the biggest county wide tournament is on the 21st.

Irvington is expressing interest again, ignore this ^.

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Irvington will not be attending, the team has been doing a lot of travelling recently, so the general consensus of the team is to stay in Westchester instead of making the trip to this. We never signed up, but I just wanted to confirm that the interest we kind of sort of expressed will not amount to...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Scarsdale is considering bidding for the NYC-area NAQT state championships. If we were to host the tournament on April 14th (the same day as the New Jersey NAQT state championships) would teams be willing to come? Tournament is still in a planning stage and is not yet assuredly going to happen (it ...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

I already told Matt this at Prison Bowl, but I think it is worth noting that no Westchester teams will be at this tournament, as Westchester's largest :chip: event is this day, and even the most fervent supporters of good quizbowl among us I am pretty sure feel bound to attend this, the Omar Q Beck...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

The one thing that people really have trouble understanding regarding conferring is when the other team has negged or when the question is over. In my experiences reading, I rarely see teams begin conferring as soon as I start reading, but it frequently happens after a neg or the question ends. It ...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Regarding Charlie Dee's post...it is true that these top teams are few and far between, though i think that Texas Invitational was a singular example of a tournament that brought together a lot of the best teams on a harder-than-normal question set ... so is it really necessary to push the limits of...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Im not advocating increasing the difficulty of 99%. I'm advocating a moderate increase of difficulty for tournaments that attract teams of a national caliber. I'd love it if every tournament was like Pace, but alas, bad teams need to play too. I really don't see why it is necessary to make tourname...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Also are there are really sets that give equal weight to Christianity and Zoroastrianism? While this might be a slight exaggeration in the sense that it is probably more like "Christianity will take up 1 question and Zoroastrianism will take up at most 1," this pretty much is the case in ...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

I agree with the thrust of Tom's points here, and apologize for this set, which should never have been submitted as such. It has been considerably reworked for future uses of it, including this Saturday's NJ State Championships. Going forward, starting with Nationals, NHBB will be taking a much mor...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

I like learning things as a result of reading these quizbowl fora, I got a question recently [In practice I believe, not a tournament] on Auden as a result of reading that very long argument about that first line buzzer race and picking up a few facts through that. I also like learning things less f...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Well, there are actually three sequences of words terminated by ?'s, none of which are proper English questions.

Your answer is?

Scaled Flowerpiercer

By the way, Irvington is marked as bringing 1 buzzer set, but we won't be able to bring any. It seems like teams are bringing plenty of buzzers as it is anyway.

Scaled Flowerpiercer

For what it's worth, Irvington will be bringing at least 2 teams (1 Varsity, 1 JV), we just haven't registered yet, hopefully other teams are just similarly slow at registering.

Scaled Flowerpiercer

I just wanted to bring up how I feel that sometimes the fact that much of High School quizbowl tends to follow a certain canon is a detractor, and wanted to inquire what "pros" are seen in having a sort of established canon. For one thing, I do want to note that tournament-wise I have been...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Irvington is also expressing tentative interest, which may be dependent upon Ardsley's decision, among other factors.

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Bowl 1. In the Bowl for Maryland, the 9th and 10th place Varsity teams (Wakefield Country Day and Mt St Joseph) did NOT make playoffs but DID qualify for Nationals. 2. In the Bowl for S. Florida, Coral Springs qualified for playoffs, but NOT Nationals 3. At Ohio State Championships, St. Charles B a...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Stuyvesant is getting on its feet with the administration, and it's looking like we might actually be able to host. If so, it'd probably be March 11th on NAQT #108A. However, we may be forced to have a pretty low field cap and our priority would be bringing in new high schools from within the city....

Scaled Flowerpiercer

deserto wrote:I am fairly sure Chatham A did not get 27 TUs in its game against Irvington A.

Also, in Irvington A's match v. Hunter B, we are marked as having gotten 0 tossups, though I think the final total score is right.

Scaled Flowerpiercer

I will try to give this another go, though the 8pm games might be a bit too early for me, I could almost definitely do this if all/most my games are at the later times.

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Some people from my team were wondering, for transportation reasons, and I am sure it would not hurt for other teams to hear the answer - do you have an estimate as to at what time this tournament will conclude?

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Going through Max's analysis of the IMSANITY I tossups, I agree with his analysis for the most part, and notably as far as "my degree of math knowledge" I could power most of them, and could answer every one not about cycloids. I feel that what these questions in particular suffered from a...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

I am sorry for the somewhat late notice, but just this last week I have started a new commitment that will prevent me from being able to participate in this on Tuesday nights, so I will have to withdraw from this round of OSPL. (believe me, I would have loved to play, but sometimes weekly AP Latin s...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

I mean, the only pro-math arguments so far in this thread have been that there are a number of precedents which show that X/X math can indeed be accessibly written for some relatively large values of X, and things along the lines of "I feel math is getting punished and no set can possibly be r...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

A bigger question is, are upsets that bad a thing? If everyone basically knew going into each round who was going to win, it would take more of the excitement out of the game. There's obviously a balance to be struck here; it shouldn't be random (like having potential 220 point swings on the basis ...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

There was a surprisingly large amount of interest from the team, so Irvington will have (3,3,0)

- I am not sure, but our adviser may have already paid you for the first two teams, if that is the case (or even if it isn't) the 3rd team's entry will be payed for by the team, not the school.

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Just as a quick note, it might be a good idea for people to look over the names of the players before they are uploaded to naqt.com, seeing as I have noticed quite a few mistakes out of just the people whom I know. If it helps, these are the mistakes I know of: (in the form {listed name} => {real na...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Well, its been another week, so....any news on the stats?

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Irvington will be a definite 2 teams, so the "1-2" can be changed to a 2.

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Irvington will be in attendance with at least one team (2 teams very likely though) and 3 buzzer systems. We probably won't be able to bring our coach though, or any moderators, hopefully that won't be a problem, though.

Scaled Flowerpiercer

John, I agree with all of the second half of your post with regards to reasons for pyramidal quizbowl, though as for the first half, I think that there in lies the large difference between Westchester and many areas, which is that Chip tournaments are about as prevalent as TU / B tournaments, and th...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

I don't have any light to shed on this from personal experience or anything, but here are the questions from the 2nd and 3rd iterations of this:

1995: http://quizbowl.stanford.edu/archive/phl95/index.html
1996: http://quizbowl.stanford.edu/archive/phl96/index.html

Scaled Flowerpiercer

When using the reader, I keep getting the same question over and over again. Is there something I should do so this doesn't happen? My only restrictions are selecting certain tournaments. The "continue" button doesn't work, either click "generate" after each question, or hit ent...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Going back to the original subject of trying to prevent the crowding of tournaments later in the year, I think that having a meeting like the one you NJ coaches are planning will rather easily solve the problem, as part of the issue is just scheduling tournaments in advance: If you want to host an O...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

George has been pretty good with keeping us up to date with the unfortunately slow progress of his teammates, I am sure as soon as something is posted somewhere, he will tell us.

Scaled Flowerpiercer

I can second what Ryan said, I would say that the portion of the distribution which would be considered trash was probably less than 1 question per packet, the distribution has not changed much from last year's HSAPQ-written nationals I am pretty sure, which had similar very little trash (though I p...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Oh nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo my laptop crashed which has all the files on it. I guess from now on we'll have to decide which teams know more things through some sort of primitive competition where teams use buzzing devices to answer questions. This, or Fred's local computer-servicing sto...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

1/1 Physics or Computer Science 1/1 Chemistry or Math 1/1 Biology or Ecology 1/1 Earth Science or Astronomy This part of the distribution seems to be a little random, I can understand ES/Astronomy being paired in an "or" and Bio/Ecology also, but I wonder what your rationale is for having...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

I suppose this is largely a regional matter, but I know that for our team Sundays in general seem like a very good idea. The team, for years, has had nearly no Christians - my Freshman year in particular the team had twice as many Zoroastrians as Christians - and even this year, now that the populat...

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