Question-specific discussion: 2016 Division I SCT

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gerbilownage
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Re: Question-specific discussion: 2016 Division I SCT

Post by gerbilownage »

yup haha, I think I confused "Giuseppe" with "Guell" in my memory somehow
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Corry
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Re: Question-specific discussion: 2016 Division I SCT

Post by Corry »

armitage wrote:
Corry wrote: 1793: This might just be a personal preference of mine, but I really don't like tossups on years. When you study history in an academic context, specific years don't really matter. Chronology? Sure, that's important- so write a question on the origins of the Committee of Public Safety. Specific decades? Yeah, sometimes that's important too- so write a question on the 1790s. But why does it matter that the Vendee Revolt specifically happened to start in the year 1793? (For the record, I got this question on the Vendee clue, but I wasn't particularly happy about it.)
I wrote this. In my mind (maybe only in my mind) the names of the various French revolutionary assemblies and factions are less memorable than years in which many important, related events occurred. The answerline "1790s" feels like it would have transparency issues. And as you said, it doesn't seem like this question style barred you from being rewarded for knowing the clues; the D2 version also played fine for the teams I read it to. I'd rethink this type of question if it turns out to have generated lots of negs elsewhere; otherwise I don't think year tossups are invalid in principle.
So this is wayyyy after the fact, but I think the conversion data bears out my concerns with this question.
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Cheynem
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Re: Question-specific discussion: 2016 Division I SCT

Post by Cheynem »

What was the conversion data?
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armitage
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Re: Question-specific discussion: 2016 Division I SCT

Post by armitage »

The 1793 tossup went 1/12/12 in 16 rooms. Skimming the other tossup conversion data puts it firmly in the bottom half of Points per Room (along with such diverse topics as the transit of Venus, partially ordered sets, or Durban) and with a really high neg rate (comparable to the tossup on Pavel Chichikov, which I assume literally everyone negged with Raskolnikov). So maybe I misjudged how important the year itself was in French history.

I still don't think it's unreasonable to ask questions on unconventional years, and I think this set should contain a few questions with an experimental flavor.
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Re: Question-specific discussion: 2016 Division I SCT

Post by Corry »

Can we also see the conversion data for Decline and Fall, the San Francisco Bay Area, Devon, and Charles Curtis?
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Re: Question-specific discussion: 2016 Division I SCT

Post by Important Bird Area »

Corry wrote:Can we also see the conversion data for Decline and Fall, the San Francisco Bay Area, Devon, and Charles Curtis?
Decline and Fall: 2/4/6 in fifteen rooms.

SF Bay Area: 0/13/8 in fourteen rooms.

Devon: 2/9/7 in fourteen rooms.

Curtis: 1/6/4 in sixteen rooms.
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Re: Question-specific discussion: 2016 Division I SCT

Post by Adventure Temple Trail »

How many rooms does NAQT believe a question has to be played in for conversion data to be meaningful?
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Re: Question-specific discussion: 2016 Division I SCT

Post by Important Bird Area »

More than those low-single-digit values... which are wrong anyway because I hit the wrong button on our website and got just the New England site of the DI SCT. Updating now.
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Re: Question-specific discussion: 2016 Division I SCT

Post by theMoMA »

Conversion data is obviously a valuable tool to assess whether particular questions played well, but I don't think a high neg rate, or less-than-perfect conversion by the end, is necessarily indicative of a bad question. For an example of an instance where a high neg rate seems acceptable to me, look no further than the "1793" question. To the extent that those buzzes were people with imperfect knowledge taking the plunge and guessing a year in the French Revolution, I'm ok with that. I suppose it's reasonably foreseeable that an answer that boils down to a year during the French Revolution might lend itself to more aggressive buzzing, and thus more negs, but I don't see that as a reason not to write on the answer. Otherwise, I think you're basically saying that some answers are ruled out because we don't want to invite players to play the game a certain way, and that seems like a dubious decision to me.

As a practical matter, editors and writers don't operate with anything close to perfect foresight when producing questions; instead, we make our best guess as to whether the tossup is gettable and will have an appropriate distribution of buzzes, etc. For an answer like "1793," which has probably never been tossed up before, the writer/editors can only guess, based on experience and feel, whether it will be converted and play well. This typically involves asking whether the answer is something worth knowing, and if so, whether it's something that people actually know. In my opinion, it's worth knowing the chronology of the French Revolution, and in my judgment, I thought it was something people would know (which it appears was true for 75% of rooms).

Tossups generally fall into a range of difficulties. This is practically impossible to avoid, and even if you could, perfect standardization of difficulty and buzz distribution would make tossups much easier to guess, because the answer would never be something more difficult than what 85% of teams know, or whatever the threshold is. I'm ok having a few harder questions in a set to keep teams honest, just as I'm ok having a few questions that might invite more guesses, and thus more negs.
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