The Quizbowl Resource Center

This is the global announcement for ACF Fall 2010, which will take place on the weekend of November 6, 2010.

Editors
Editor-in-Chief: Evan Adams (VCU)
Assistant Editors: Dallas Simons (Harvard), Carsten Gehring (Carleton), Will Butler (UVA), Guy Tabachnick (Brown), and John Lawrence (Yale).

Hosting: [Map of Sites]
New England: Brandeis
Mid-Atlantic: University of Virginia
Southeast: University of South Carolina
South: University of Alabama
Texas-Area: University of Oklahoma
Great Lakes: Ohio State
Eastern Canada: McMaster
North: Carleton
Midwest: Truman State
California: CalTech
Northwest: Boise State
United Kingdom: Oxford

Packet Submission
As per the ACF submission rules, any team with at least one person on it who played a regular, collegiate, academic quizbowl tournament prior to September 1, 2009 is required to submit a packet in order to participate in an ACF tournament in 2010-2011. This includes ACF Fall. Teams required to submit packets who do not submit one by the final deadline will be dropped from the tournament.

Please submit packets to [email protected] and use "ACF Fall 2010: [Team Name]" in the subject line.

Submission schedule and additional discount

This year's submission schedule is as follows:

Packet submitted before 11:59 PM on:
Sept 19, 2010: -$50
Sept 26, 2010: -$25 (-$50 for teams not required to submit packets)
Oct 10, 2010: No penalty (-$25 for teams not required to submit packets)
Oct 17, 2010: +$25
Oct 24, 2010: +$50
After Oct. 24, 2010: The editors may grant one or more 24-hour extensions at an additional penalty of $10 per day.

Additional discounts are offered for travel, buzzers, staffers, etc. Please refer to the tournament fees and discounts section of the ACF guidelines for further information.

Packet penalties
Teams will incur penalties for the following offenses:
• Incorrect formatting: Several teams continue to submit incorrectly formatted packets despite the guidelines clearly stated on the ACF Question Formatting Guidelines document. Please take a moment to review the guidelines and format your packet accordingly.
• Plagiarism: Please do not attempt to plagiarize. It is often very easy to catch. Please also refer to this thread excoriating those who attempted to plagiarize at ACF Fall 2008. This happened a lot in 2008, and if it happens again the consequences will be enforced.
• Writing specific types of forbidden questions: Types of questions prohibited at ACF events include spelling questions, binary matching bonuses, 5-10-15 bonuses, etc.
Please see the additional packet penalties section for more info.

Friendly reminders
Please refer to the ACF Packet Submission and Fee Information document for a more detailed explanation of submission and fee-related information.

If you are sending multiple packet writing teams, PLEASE make sure you don’t collaborate on your packets, or talk about their contents.

The difficulty level of ACF Fall 2010 is the same as that of the last two years, so teams are encouraged to follow the difficulty levels of ACF Fall 2008 and ACF Fall 2009. Those tournaments can be found here: http://collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com. Remember above all that this tournament is supposed to be accessible to new teams who have never played quizbowl before. If you suspect one of your answer choices may be too hard, it probably is.

If you have any other questions, please let me know at [email protected]

Packets Received by the -$50 deadline:
RPI A
Dorman
Chipola A
VCU
RPI B
UNC A
Maryland A
Claremont A
Northwestern A
Cornell A
Yale B
Toronto A
UCSD
Rancho Bernardo HS
Lisle HS
Bellarmine HS
Arizona State C


Packets Received by the -$25 deadline:
Yale A
Brandeis A
Kansas State A
Wooster A
Maryland B

Packets received by the no-penalty deadline:
Miami of Ohio A
Miami of Ohio B
Miami of Ohio C
University of Minnesota Morris
Oxford
Delaware

Packets received by the +$25 deadline:
Ohio State
Ottawa
Washington
Rutgers-Camden
Wisconsin-Madison
UCLA

Packets received by the +$50 deadline:
Dartmouth
Iowa
Notre Dame
Centre
Harding
Chicago A
Chicago B
Michigan

Packets received really late:
Brown [+$60]
Arizona State F [+$70]
Michigan State [+$80]
William and Mary [+160]
Penn [+170]

I played CaTO/TaCO before September 1, 2009, but I am still in high school. Which of these takes precedence in determining whether St. Anselm's would need to submit a packet?

Prof.Whoopie wrote:I played CaTO/TaCO before September 1, 2009, but I am still in high school. Which of these takes precedence in determining whether St. Anselm's would need to submit a packet?

High school teams are exempt from writing packets. You're welcome to submit one for a discount though, according to the "teams not required to submit" deadlines.

Any news on regional hosts for ACF Fall?

Edward Powers wrote:Any news on regional hosts for ACF Fall?

I imagine such announcements would come after the September 18th deadline for bids.

That makes sense. Thanks George.

Frater Taciturnus wrote:

Edward Powers wrote:Any news on regional hosts for ACF Fall?

I imagine such announcements would come after the September 18th deadline for bids.

That is the case. We're still taking bids from everywhere, but I will say I'm especially interested in bids from schools in New England, Florida, the Great Lakes, "Niagara" region, Texas, and South Carolina/Northern Georgia.

vcuEvan wrote:

Frater Taciturnus wrote:

Edward Powers wrote:Any news on regional hosts for ACF Fall?

I imagine such announcements would come after the September 18th deadline for bids.

That is the case. We're still taking bids from everywhere, but I will say I'm especially interested in bids from schools in New England, Florida, the Great Lakes, "Niagara" region, Texas, and South Carolina/Northern Georgia.

We still don't have any bids in any of these regions. Anyone interested in hosting (or having a fall mirror in their region), needs to get moving on this and e-mail me over the next couple of weeks.

For New England--if teams like Yale or NYU or Columbia are worried about not getting enough staff to host, I can guarantee that Harvard would bring on the order of three or four staffers (enabling six to eight teams) and is unlikely to bring more than one or two teams. I bet a lot of other teams in the northeast would do similarly.

The -$50 deadline for ACF Fall packets expires in about 48 hours. I'll keep a running tally of the packets I've received at the bottom of my first post in this thread.

I've updated my original post with the locations of sites. We're still looking for a Florida and a New England site. Also, the -$50 deadline has expired for teams that need to write packets.

Any idea who MIGHT host for New England? Have you narrowed it down to a final 2, let's say, or are there as yet no bids from the region at all?

Edward Powers wrote:Any idea who MIGHT host for New England? Have you narrowed it down to a final 2, let's say, or are there as yet no bids from the region at all?

The impression I got at ACF novice was that Brown and Harvard were considering hosting. (someone please correct me if this is mistaken or if this has been worked out since then)

Either would probably be reasonable; we'd be pretty happy seeing another team host, though.

Is there a forum thread somewhere for the Virginia/Mid-Atlantic ACF Fall mirror?

mpellegrini wrote:Is there a forum thread somewhere for the Virginia/Mid-Atlantic ACF Fall mirror?

Not yet; Will's waiting for room reservation confirmation.

Any news on the New England site?

Ondes Martenot wrote:Any news on the New England site?

I still haven't received a bid.

Brandeis would not mind hosting the tournament for New England, as long as we didn't have to do stats (or if we received extensive help with stats).

I'm sure there exists a team in the Northeast that could supply someone who knows how to do stats, but really, it's not very hard. If you have 15 minutes to spend on IM/the phone, any number of people (including myself) would happily teach you everything there is to know about doing stats.

Thanks so much for the tips! I've just been helped by Ian Eppler from Brown, and I've just sent in the bid to Evan.

The New England mirror is now at Brandeis University.

Excellent. A separate thread will be made for the mirror as soon as our room requests go through.

The extended discussion of statkeeping and online scoresheets has been moved to another thread.

Would having been to Sun 'N Fun 2009 require me to write a packet for ACF Fall?

vcuEvan wrote: Packets received by the no-penalty deadline:
Miami of Ohio A
Miami of Ohio B
Miami of Ohio C
University of Minnesota Morris

Last edited by vcuEvan on Mon Oct 11, 2010 2:29 pm

What about us?

Reminder: The +$25 deadline for packets is this Sunday.

The +$25 deadline has passed. Teams have a little under a week to submit questions for the +$50 deadline.

Submit your packets by midnight tonight (your time) to make the +$50 deadlines. All teams that want one can have an extension, but it will cost $10 a day. So finish your packets.

No Michigan State? Someone would do well do to consider submitting a presumably finished packet instead of making pictures of Admiral Akbar.

Packets have been sent. If you haven't received them (and you're supposed to), email me asap.