British Student Quiz Championships 2013 (May 18th, London)

[Edmund]

The British Student Quiz Championships (BSQC) 2013 will be held on May 18th 2013 at Imperial College in London. They are organised by BuzzerQuiz in association with NAQT.

I am posting here for as a central announcement and also for the general information of our friends in the US and for continuity of record keeping, as opposed to any expectation that many of the prospective attendees will frequent these boards. Please post below or contact [email protected] to enter a team or for more information.

Cost:

£25 per team

£10 discount (one team only) to institutions not represented at BSQC 2011 or BSQC 2012
£5 discount per working buzzer set

The question set will be adapted ("Briticised") by BuzzerQuiz from Division II of the NAQT ICT 2013. For obvious reasons, players intending to participate in BSQC this year have a personal responsibility to ensure that: (a) they avoid contact with this question set; (b) if they are NAQT writers, their questions do not go into the ICT Div II set.

Games will be untimed rounds of 24/24, with powers, according to the following distribution:

4/4 Literature (of which 2/2 British)
4/4 History (of which 1.5/1.5 British)
4/4 Science and Mathematics
2/2 Fine Art (1/1 visual, 1/1 musical)
2/2 Geography (of which 0.5/0.5 British)
2/2 RMP
1/1 Current Events (of which 0.5/0.5 British)
1/1 Social Science
2/2 Popular Culture
2/2 Miscellaneous (including 1/0 that augments the three core topics)

[Edmund]

Rolling field (11 teams):

Cambridge
Imperial
KCL
Manchester
Open University
Oxford (3 teams)
Sheffield
Southampton
Warwick

[Kyle]

That's way, way, way too much British content for both geography and current events. I know that you are only copying NAQT's sub-distribution, which skews both geography and current events way, way, way too heavily toward the United States, but in this case we're talking about an even smaller country with fewer people. You're creating more work for yourself and the result is just going to be that you're going to run out of important Scottish rivers and interesting stately homes with rhinoceroses on display by the third or fourth round.

[Edmund]

You're creating more work for yourself and the result is just going to be that you're going to run out of important Scottish rivers and interesting stately homes with rhinoceroses on display by the third or fourth round.

Glad you feel that that's all the geography of the British Isles has to offer. I assure you that there is plenty of depth packed into what may be a comparatively small area.

In seriousness, I'm happy to discuss distribution with you, but it may be less distracting to do so off the public forum. It's not going to change for this tournament.

[Matt Weiner]

In seriousness, I'm happy to discuss distribution with you, but it may be less distracting to do so off the public forum. It's not going to change for this tournament.

Don't tell people not to discuss things on the board.

[Tees-Exe Line]

That's way, way, way too much British content for both geography and current events. I know that you are only copying NAQT's sub-distribution, which skews both geography and current events way, way, way too heavily toward the United States, but in this case we're talking about an even smaller country with fewer people. You're creating more work for yourself and the result is just going to be that you're going to run out of important Scottish rivers and interesting stately homes with rhinoceroses on display by the third or fourth round.

Glad you feel that that's all the geography of the British Isles has to offer. I assure you that there is plenty of depth packed into what may be a comparatively small area.

I would like to mirror your tournament at the University of Chicago, with a field consisting of me and whoever else wants to join. I'm serious.

[Important Bird Area]

Perhaps assemble the British content into a side event for CO?

[Tees-Exe Line]

Perhaps assemble the British content into a side event for CO?

Aside from scheduling congestion considerations, I like this idea. Jeff, if it's just the two of us we can run it as a shootout in my living room before the Friday barbecue, or some slightly larger version of that.

The more stately homes and Scottish mountains, the better. Jeff--you're on.

[Important Bird Area]

Challenge accepted!

[naan/steak-holding toll]

On a semi-related note, was the British History from ACF Fall ever assembled into a side event?

[Tees-Exe Line]

On a semi-related note, was the British History from ACF Fall ever assembled into a side event?

Did the British crowd write special questions for that too? If those exist it would be fun to combine them with the British content written for this set as the CO side tournament.

[Cheynem]

I'm confused why ACF Fall would need to British-ize anything. I admit to not being British, so perhaps I underestimate the vast cultural gap, but what in particular about Fall (with the possible exception of trash)'s distro would need to be changed to have better play in other countries (particularly within history)? Do Canadian teams Canada-ize sets?

I can kinda see doing this to NAQT which emphasizes American current events, trash, and geography more, but ACF?

[Tees-Exe Line]

I admit to not being British

Well there's your problem right there!

[Senator_Jay]

As a Canadian, I heartily appreciate this tournament's attempt to move some focus away from the US. I'm sure at least a few of us up here would be willing to participate in some sort of British side event at CO. Regarding ACF Fall up here, we don't really Canadianize our packets (at least not knowingly), although there do tend to be frequent complaints that the rest of the world isn't represented as much. Understanding that a lot of the things that people up here recognize and know about tend to be English-language things, of which American content is highly representative, it would nevertheless I think be interesting/helpful to expand the amount of non-US-specific content. Just a thought.

[Masked Canadian History Bandit]

Do Canadian teams Canada-ize sets?

This doesn't happen on the collegiate level, but for high school this happens with NAQT sets, where super-Americana content is replaced with either Canadiana or easier Americana (with NAQT's permission of course). When I mirrored mACF tournaments at Lisgar, I would read over the set and convert imperial into metric, add some "u"s, and clarify in giveaways that things were American (e.g. giveaway for Pullman strike might change from "this 1894 railway strike" to "this 1894 railway strike in the United States").

[Edmund]

I have no opposition to running a brief side tournament at CO based on the UK-authored content to this set. I'd expect what we write this year to run to about 60/60 total (I could straightforwardly compile three packets of 20/20) with a near enough 3:3:2:1:1 distribution across British lit, history, trash, geography, and current events only.

Mike - the reason that ACF Fall might deserve some Briticisation is simply a slight shift in deprioritising US content by removing some culturally alien US stuff and making other parts of the US history/lit distribution much easier, and also adding some UK history/lit, particularly stuff that doesn't really impact on either the ACF or NAQT canon but is well known to us. The aim is to improve the distribution for the field by mitigating unanswered tossups and reducing the chance of an artificially elevated number of zeroes and 30s in place of 10s and 20s in bonus sets.

Even though the US history that appears in ACF Fall should for the most part be on topics that we can entirely reasonably expect any British person sufficiently interested in world history to know about, it's nice to be able to toss up and ask bonuses on deeper parts of British history (especially 19th C and 20th C), standing in place of the odd bonus set on Reconstruction, or how mean Jackson was to the natives. I think even combining all the UK history we've ever written for ACF Fall, it doesn't add up to a great deal of questions.

Just to give an example on the whole point of the exercise, I tossed up Denis Healey at the Guerrilla before ICT in 2011 in an intentionally 100% British packet written for very high calibre players, and I believe it went dead in every room. Healey is probably one of the four or five most important politicians in the postwar UK not to have been Prime Minister. Yet at ACF Fall we could quite reasonably expect a tossup on, say, Kissinger, or McNamara, or Adlai Stevenson, or Newt Gingrich, _and_ I would expect British people to know who these people are. But you will never find a Denis Healey tossup in ACF Fall or ICT Div II, which is why sometimes we like to add one.

[Tees-Exe Line]

I tossed up Denis Healey at the Guerrilla before ICT in 2011

Very sorry to have missed it! Though there's always a chance I would have negged....

[AKKOLADE]

Just to give an example on the whole point of the exercise, I tossed up Denis Healey at the Guerrilla before ICT in 2011 in an intentionally 100% British packet written for very high calibre players, and I believe it went dead in every room. Healey is probably one of the four or five most important politicians in the postwar UK not to have been Prime Minister. Yet at ACF Fall we could quite reasonably expect a tossup on, say, Kissinger, or McNamara, or Adlai Stevenson, or Newt Gingrich, _and_ I would expect British people to know who these people are. But you will never find a Denis Healey tossup in ACF Fall or ICT Div II, which is why sometimes we like to add one.

Probably because no one would answer it.

[Edmund]

Just to give an example on the whole point of the exercise, I tossed up Denis Healey at the Guerrilla before ICT in 2011 in an intentionally 100% British packet written for very high calibre players, and I believe it went dead in every room. Healey is probably one of the four or five most important politicians in the postwar UK not to have been Prime Minister. Yet at ACF Fall we could quite reasonably expect a tossup on, say, Kissinger, or McNamara, or Adlai Stevenson, or Newt Gingrich, _and_ I would expect British people to know who these people are. But you will never find a Denis Healey tossup in ACF Fall or ICT Div II, which is why sometimes we like to add one.

Probably because no one would answer it.

Do you mean that no-one would answer such a question in ACF Fall or ICT Div II when read to the fields for which they're prepared? If so, I totally agree with you. Of course they wouldn't. Such a question on that depth of British political history should never be in those sets.

But if the field differs sufficiently in terms of its range of knowledge, so should the edited tournament set - when we read ACF Fall to a large group of educated and able British quizbowlers, it is nicer to be able to test their knowledge about the culture of their own country also, which simply by background and schooling will be present at different depth for different topics compared to an equivalent player in the US. That's all we're trying to do, by swapping out a few questions.

[Edmund]

Sorry for not posting results sooner - I was at Lord's watching England trounce New Zealand at cricket.

11 teams from 9 universities competed in yesterday's British Student Quiz Championships. A full round-robin was played, with King's College London clearing the field 10-0 and Oxford A finishing 9-1.

An advantaged final was played. Oxford A won both games, 505-295 and then 625-275, to take the British Student Quiz Championships trophy for the third year. The quality of play in the finals was striking with a very high frequency of powers and 30 point bonuses.

John Lawrence (KCL) was the top-scoring player of the day with over 130 PPG. Other players with >= 50 PPG were Tris Cole (Open), Alex Bubb (Oxford A), and Zachary Vermeer (Oxford A). Oxford C were the highest placed undergraduate team with a final record of 6-4 and were declared undergraduate champions.

Stats:

Prelims
All Games

Final standings:

1. Oxford A 11-1
2. KCL 10-2
=3. Manchester 6-4
=3. Oxford C (UG) 6-4
=3. Sheffield 6-4
=6. Cambridge (UG) 5-5
=6. Imperial 5-5
8. Open 4-6
9. Oxford B 3-7
10. Southampton 1-9
11. Warwick (UG) 0-10