Player Survey Results

jonah · Post by **jonah** » Thu Apr 23, 2009 2:32 pm

Matt Laird and I are pleased to present the results of a survey we conducted of current and former players of Illinois high school Scholastic Bowl. We made every effort possible to contact as many players as we could, employing Facebook, word of mouth, instant messaging, and email; furthermore, we emailed all IHSSBCA member coaches asking them to have their players take the survey, and requested that players encourage their teammates and former teammates to take the survey. We received responses from 231 people, of whom 133 were current players, from March 24 to April 22. (For comparison, there were 207 respondents to the survey of coaches.) The responses were geographically diverse.

Multiple voting was prevented via both IP tracking and cookies; while we cannot absolutely guarantee that this was effective, we believe it was. Certainly, it would have required a significant amount of effort to subvert, and respondents were reminded that doing so would be highly unethical and render the results invalid. Coaches were prevented from voting (except for Mike Laudermith and Matt himself, who as former players were eligible to vote) by not giving them the URL of the survey; we only distributed the URL to persons eligible to vote.

We have filtered the results as follows. If someone is interested in seeing another filter (for example, how players who voted to eliminate Category X voted on Category Y), let me know and I can post that.

Matt and I will be presenting these results to the IHSA Advisory Committee members along with a letter explaining the survey's methodology and results, and additionally explaining our own opinions. In order to maintain the focus on the bonus format issue, we will postpone discussion of eliminating computational math for a future year; while we agree that this is highly important, we do not wish to distract from a goal for which we have a preponderance of advocating data. We are thrilled with the success of this survey, and in future years, we may conduct additional polls.

If anyone has questions about any of this, Matt and I would be glad to answer them either in this thread or via email. Thanks to everyone who participated in the survey.