High School Celebrity Shoot challenge

[First Chairman]

Anyone who would like to take up the challenge of the High School Celebrity Shoot Biography Tournament Preliminary Test, please let me know. I can email folks a copy of the test. You have to be on the honor system of course, but you can unofficially compare your score against other scores from students competing at Case and Duke. I would be interested to see how certain areas of the country do on this test anyway.

It's a 30 minute biography identification test. The general statistics currently are as follows:

Overall High School students
n = 198
Average 33.6
Stdev 22.1
Quartiles: 18, 26, 46
Hi (so far) 116

Overall Freshmen/Sophomores
n = 65
Average 25.2
Stdev 15.5
Quartiles: 15, 22, 34
Hi (so far) 65

Adults (those beyond High School, not counting internal testers)
n = 28
Average 81.8
Stdev 37.1
Quartiles: 63, 86.5, 111.5
Hi (so far) 130

Depending on the response I get, I will probably schedule a range of dates to distribute the test. I would appreciate feedback, assuming that you are taking the test under proper proctored conditions.

[solonqb]

Having done Celebrity Shoot for a few years, I'm curious to see what this years test was like.

Who knows, maybe I can convince my colleagues here to mirror Celebrity Shoot. We shall see.

[First Chairman]

I'm in favor of mirroring if people want to collaborate on this. The more the merrier for sure. :)

[Irreligion in Bangladesh]

I'm interested...except I don't know what it is. What exactly is Celebrity Shoot?

[First Chairman]

The tournament is something that I and a few Case folks invented ten years ago. The name High School Celebrity Shoot was a result of a humorous serendipidous viewing of Charleton Heston's Celebrity Shoot (on ESPN) while we were in the hotel preparing for College Bowl Regionals. [Poor Joe Mantegna... poor clay pigeons.]

The unique points:
1) It's an academic theme competition, i.e. "Biography Bowl". (Those of us who have history on this discussion will appreciate this.) Consequently, there is no math calculation, but there is a little more trash. Rest assured, we do cover the standard high school academic curriculum.

2) There are no buzzers. All students write down their responses. It's like taking the Jeopardy! test, except that all the answers pertain to identifying people.

3) It is both a team and an individual competition. Teams consist of exactly four students, and there are no roster substitutions during the team competition. Each member of that team will contribute equally to the team score.

4) If you have any leftover students, they can be put together quasi-randomly into four-person chimeric/bastard/mixed teams. It is our policy that all students play the competition as much as we can. We strongly encourage teams to bring all their kids, even if the number is not divisible by 4.

5) You need one large auditorium and at least 4 or 8 classrooms, rather than n/2 classrooms, buzzers, timers, etc. Life is a lot easier if your auditorium has multimedia capability (specifically LCD projector, microphone).

6) Adults/coaches can also compete (our policy is for free if there is space). We have found this to enhance interactions among teams and the source of many "fun" challenges between students and coaches.

Schedule of events:
8:30 to 9:15 Registration (verify names and grades in school)
9:15 to 9:40 Assigning chimeric teams
9:45 to 10:30 Preliminary written test (70 questions/30 minutes)
10:30 to 11:00 Everyone convenes in auditorium; project answer key for prelim test. Proctors grade as many prelim tests as possible.
11:00 to 12:30 Foursomes round (44 questions worth 10, 20, 30 points: teams answer questions given orally and are allowed to confer among themselves)
12:30 to 1:30 Lunch break
1:30 to 2:45 Category Relay (40 questions split into 8 categories: teams decide one member of the team to answer questions in each category on their behalf. Reminiscent of Decathlon "Super Quiz" except it's not a multiple choice test and the categories change.)
3:00 to 5:00 Individual Finals (top 64 scoring individuals placed into single elimination bracket)
5:00 to 5:30 Individual Championship Final Four (surviving 4 students playing 2 games for final 1st to 4th placement)
Awards Ceremony to finish.

Team championship: The team with the highest composite score wins:
Individual test (200 x 4 students) + Foursomes (800 points) + Category Relay (800 points) = 2400 possible. This is "meet play" not "match play."

Individual Shootout Finals: minimum of 10 random questions of value 2, 3, or 5 points. Whoever leads after 10 advances; otherwise, tiebreakers are given until one person scores AND the other does not.

The competition is more relaxing for students and adults as the down time allows for socializing. Pressure is on the staff to grade the papers, proctor tests, and create the final shootout pairings. On the other hand, the tournament directing staff has a lot more flexibility and leeway to running this event as its logistics provides.

Awards given
1) Top 4 teams
2) Final 4 individuals
3) Top 4 freshmen/sophomores according to test scores [Paul Harvey Award]

Optional awards (usually involves me ordering more bling)
1) Best chimeric student team
2) Top adult scorer(s)
3) Top student scorer(s)

Theoretically, the minimum number of students you want to work with is 64 (16 teams) so you can have a full bracket. The maximum limits depend on the facilities you have to run the event without making everyone feel cramped during Foursomes.

[FCqb]

It sounds like a really intriguing idea, I'd definitely be interested in a mirror if anyone could swing it. :)