NAQT Collegiate Novice Series

[Important Bird Area]

Starting with the 2015–16 competition year, NAQT is introducing a Collegiate Novice Series of questions intended for use at tournaments catering to newer and more casual players. These packet sets are a spiritual descendant of the series of (Early Autumn) Collegiate Novice tournament sets previously edited by Andrew Hart and, in fact, Andrew will be playing a major editorial role in their production now that he is a member of NAQT.

Two different sets will be available, each with twelve packets of 24 tossups and 24 bonuses. The first will be pitched slightly below NAQT’s Division II Sectional Championship Tournament (SCT) sets, while the latter will be slightly harder than NAQT’s Intramural sets. The former is targeted at players with significant high school quiz bowl experience (but less college experience), while the latter is targeted at entirely new programs and players at established programs with minimal playing experience in high school. (As with NAQT’s other regular-season tournaments, hosts will be able to set their own eligibility rules, though NAQT is happy to advise on appropriate guidelines.)

As part of making this series available, NAQT will also be embarking on a marketing campaign to entice more colleges and universities to get involved with quiz bowl. We hope to have many interested hosts, as we anticipate that a nearby tournament will make it more likely for a school to give the activity a try!

The first sets will be derived from Invitational Series #150 (to produce Collegiate Novice Series #150C) and Invitational Series #151A (to produce Collegiate Novice Series #151AC), with new questions being written to fit NAQT’s collegiate distribution (and to replace material that is only appropriate for high schoolers). In particular, neither set will contain computation questions. Teams hosting high school tournaments using either base set should be aware of this link: They may not be able to attend a competition using a Collegiate Novice Series if they have already hosted their own event (and thus been exposed to much of the content). Of course, there is no problem with attending a novice tournament and then hosting a high school event on the corresponding Invitational Series.

[Important Bird Area]

I'll be available for questions both here and in the irc.

[Cheynem]

Couple questions:

1. Is the distribution the same as, say, SCT?

2. The difficulty I assume is around IS set level? Would they be recommended for like intramural play?

3. What is the pricing of such sets?

[Important Bird Area]

Couple questions:

1. Is the distribution the same as, say, SCT?

2. The difficulty I assume is around IS set level? Would they be recommended for like intramural play?

3. What is the pricing of such sets?

Exactly the same distribution as SCT and ICT, but IS difficulty. These would probably work for intramural play, but would be more difficult than NAQT's existing intramural set (which, being intended specifically for intramural play, uses a different distribution with a bit more pop culture and sports).

Licensing a set for a tournament involves an $85 base fee and a $16-per-team fee. Hosts will receive a $50 rebate on the licensing fee for sending NAQT the results of the tournament.

[Fado Alexandrino]

Licensing a set for a tournament involves an $85 base fee and a $16-per-team fee. Hosts will receive a $50 rebate on the licensing fee for sending NAQT the results of the tournament.

Wonderful, so it costs the same as a regular IS set rather than a regular college set.

What does NAQT recommend as field restrictions (if any) for these sets? The same as what Collegiate Novice et al. set as restrictions?

[The Favourite]

Will Community College SCTs be played on these sets as well? That would be nice to know for teams who are wanting to host or play on this set, especially those who would likely draw CCs, such as here in Oklahoma or in Florida.

[ValenciaQBowl]

I hope not! IS-sets are at a fine difficulty level for CC SCTs, I reckon.

[theMoMA]

Hey, just wanted to remind people that these sets are available for mirrors starting soon! I'm the main editor for both. There are two sets: one derived from an IS set, and one derived from an IS-A set. Both use NAQT's collegiate distribution rather than the high school distribution.

I'm fashioning the IS-level set in the mode of Collegiate Novice from past years; this set is, for all intents and purposes, the extension of "Collegiate Novice." Aside from the NAQT (college) distribution and format, this tournament should have the same feel, and should fulfill the same purpose, as the Collegiate Novice sets of yore (mainly, it's intended to serve as an appropriate introduction to college quizbowl for players at existing programs).

The A-level set, on the other hand, is intended for folks who have never played pyramidal quizbowl. This is an area where I was sad to see the original Collegiate Novice come up short--it was much better at giving existing programs an event for their newer players--but I'm hopeful that a dedicated introductory set can help us achieve the goal of getting new programs interested in the game. We would love to line up hosts who are interested in doing significant outreach work encouraging local schools to form teams and play this event.

We would also love to see hosts with the requisite resources and demand run two-division tournaments, using the IS-level set to introduce new players at existing programs to the college game and the A-level set to introduce new teams and programs to quizbowl in general.

These sets will be available starting in mid-November and running into the spring semester. In future years, we're planning to make them available earlier in the fall to coincide with the Collegiate Novice slot. We hope that there will be many sites so that teams don't have to travel far.

Please contact [email protected] or 1‑888‑411‑6278 ("NAQT") if you'd like to host! If you've got any questions about the sets, feel free to email me ([email protected]) or Jeff Hoppes ([email protected]) or to post below.

[Cheynem]

Can you respond to concerns that such sets are functionally equivalent to the unfortunate old practice of collegiate tournaments being run on IS or A set questions, which tended to be rather unpopular among the established community?

[Important Bird Area]

We believe that we have addressed those concerns by 1) choosing to use a college (not high school) distribution for these sets and 2) making sure the sets are difficulty-appropriate for their audiences.

[theMoMA]

I understand that there is some confusion about the difference between the two sets.

IS-150C is a level-4 set that's derived from the high school series IS-150. The tossups are 375-425 characters. This set uses the same distribution as NAQT's college sets and should be roughly equivalent in difficulty to DII SCT, though probably a bit easier because there are no questions downconverted from DI in this set. It should be hosted by colleges for their own new players and for new players at nearby existing programs (i.e. the same purpose as the original Collegiate Novice sets).

IS-151AC is a level-3 set that's derived from the high school series IS-151A. The tossups are 260-291 characters (about a line shorter than a DII SCT question, for example). This set uses the same distribution as NAQT's college sets. It is intended for entirely new programs that have never played pyramidal quizbowl before. Unless you plan to do a significant amount of outreach with entirely new programs, this is not the set that you should use.

[Sima Guang Hater]

I think if you want to run sets on IS questions, you need to have real controls over things like eligibility and format, like you did with collegiate novice. That means it really should be people who have never played pyramidal quizbowl before, there shouldn't be single elim championships, etc. Otherwise it's distorting the vision.

IS-151AC is a level-3 set that's derived from the high school series IS-151A. The tossups are 260-291 characters (about a line shorter than a DII SCT question, for example). This set uses the same distribution as NAQT's college sets. It is intended for entirely new programs that have never played pyramidal quizbowl before. Unless you plan to do a significant amount of outreach with entirely new programs, this is not the set that you should use.

I've said this to you before, but this isn't a very good idea; by reaching out to new schools using literally high school questions, you're giving them an unfair image of what quizbowl is like. If our longterm goal is to have every single college in the country playing something like ACF Fall (which I think is a fair goal), this really isn't the way to go about it. All NAQT seems to be doing is creating ever easier and easier sub-circuits for these schools to be trapped in, which is exactly what happened the last time people tried to run college tournaments on IS sets.

[theMoMA]

In separate posts, let me walk through my rationale and intuition behind both sets. I see them as two distinct tools for two distinct jobs.

The set derived from the A series is intended to introduce new programs to pyramidal quizbowl. I believe there is a fundamental disconnect between a certain circuit "purism" and the reality of getting new programs interested in quizbowl. The fact, which I've seen play out in person several times, is that Fall and even IS questions are too difficult for teams that have literally never played pyramidal quizbowl before. They contain too many clues that will almost certainly go dead and too many questions on things that you need to have practiced a few sets to know. Many of the teams at NAQT's IS-A collegiate events will be playing their first tournament ever, and possibly their first pyramidal questions ever; they won't have any use for the additional difficulty and length of IS questions. Once the collegiate distribution is applied, IS-A questions, which are shorter and easier, are better for people who have never played quizbowl before. The IS-A set will introduce green players to the essential feel and subject matter of quizbowl at its simplest form. My thought is that this is exactly what new programs need to have (along with materials about other upcoming tournaments, which I will work with hosts to provide).

Both sets of questions are distributed the same as the college sets, which, among other things, requires writing many questions that are intended only for the college sets. As the set editor, it's my prerogative to make the sets representative of (as I said above) the essential feel and subject matter of college quizbowl at its simplest form. It's simply not true that they're "literally high school questions"; the sets are being distributed, edited, and in many cases, written specifically for use at the college level. Many of the questions are appropriate for use at multiple levels, rather than reflective of some essentialist idea of "high school questions," because of how pyramidality works: quizbowl is a game where people at different stages and skill levels can compete on the same questions.

The players who will play the easier set should mostly be from schools that don't have existing teams yet, so the overlap between "people you know" and "people playing A-set questions" should be about zero.

To Eric's other concern above, there is no "sub-circuit" of IS-A sets at the college level; at the moment, there is exactly one of those tournaments available, which will be hosted in places like Sioux Falls, South Dakota for schools that have never played quizbowl before. At max, there will be tournaments aimed at college novices in both the fall and spring semester (although not this year, given the late announcement of the sets). Whether that will include a second IS-A-derived set in subsequent years is unclear and depends on whether it's useful. I do not anticipate massive demand for the IS-A-derived set; as I said, circuit sites should use the IS-derived set.

It's almost certainly true that there are players who will tap out at any level above IS-A. But there is no harm in activating those players to quizbowl at a lower level first. These players can't "capture" their programs at the IS-A difficulty levels, and thus crowd out a group of students who would otherwise play higher levels. Setting aside the sheer unlikelihood that a second group of students exists at a previously untapped college who don't play their school's first tournament but are nonetheless more hardcore than the people who do play that tournament, there simply isn't a circuit of IS-A-level questions to play. And to the extent those novice tournaments recur annually, they have eligibility restrictions that make for an "up or out" progression into the game.

Although many players may invariably quit once they're forced to play at higher levels, I think there's a large benefit to running lower-level events: if people have fun at a tournament or two, they might become staffers, high school coaches, logistics people, collegiate players in grad school (at schools where they don't have to set up new teams), etc. But if the fine folks at Augustana College in Sioux Falls never get a chance to play quizbowl, or if they're given a set that's not appropriate to their skill level, they'll never do any of those things. In that case, the Dakotas, and many regions, will continue to be as ignorant to quizbowl as certain participants in the "2016 presidential thread" are to the sacrifices that John Cena has made in service to this great nation.

Growing college quizbowl is something that I care about very deeply. I hope people have taken that much away from the significant amount of work I've spent shaping ACF Fall and Collegiate Novice into tournaments that help teams recruit and keep players. I've always been disappointed that those tournaments didn't seem to be the tools for the job when it comes to growing new circuits. Now, because NAQT has picked up the Collegiate Novice mission, we have the resources to produce a super-easy tournament for this circuit-growth mission. I think it's important to avoid having such a purist's vision of quizbowl that a person who's picking up the buzzer on pyramidal questions (perhaps literally for the first time) is of no use to us if those questions aren't of a certain length or difficulty. The fact is that we don't know how to grow college circuits very well. I don't know if hosting very easy tournaments will pay dividends. But I do have the strong intuition that it will work better than hosting harder tournaments simply because they're closer to the purist's vision, with no regard for the players' actual skill level. If it doesn't work at all, so be it. But I'd at least like to try.

[theMoMA]

This second, much shorter post addresses the IS-derived set.

The set derived from the IS series is intended for existing programs to host for their new players. It should have the same feel as the Collegiate Novice sets I used to write, except with the NAQT collegiate distribution and format. (I would personally encourage hosts to avoid the timer on this one, for simplicity's sake, although people are obviously free to make their own decisions on that.) Circuit hosts should use this set. I imagine that about 90% of the players who play one of these sets will play this set.

The mission of the IS-A set depends on dedicated people on the ground in the region drumming up interest and hosting a set for entirely new teams. It's experimental and I have no idea if it'll work (though I really hope it does). It's a bit disappointing, although perhaps expected, that the majority of the feedback on this announcement has focused on the smaller, experimental component of the series, which has very little (if anything) to do with the quizbowl circuit as it presently exists.

The IS-derived set is the major component of the NAQT College Novice series. It's not experimental. It's the institutionalized continuation of the mission of my old tournament: an easy, fun event early in the year (after this year; sorry for our late announcement) whose mission is to improve new-player retention. Please host and enjoy it for years to come.