2017 ICT general discussion

Old college threads.
Locked
User avatar
Important Bird Area
Forums Staff: Administrator
Posts: 6113
Joined: Thu Aug 28, 2003 3:33 pm
Location: San Francisco Bay Area
Contact:

2017 ICT general discussion

Post by Important Bird Area »

This is your discussion thread for big-picture issues about the 2017 NAQT ICT (either division). If you'd like to discuss the specific text of a particular question, please use the two threads available for that purpose.
Jeff Hoppes
President, Northern California Quiz Bowl Alliance
former HSQB Chief Admin (2012-13)
VP for Communication and history subject editor, NAQT
Editor emeritus, ACF

"I wish to make some kind of joke about Jeff's love of birds, but I always fear he'll turn them on me Hitchcock-style." -Fred
User avatar
theMoMA
Forums Staff: Administrator
Posts: 5993
Joined: Mon Oct 23, 2006 2:00 am

Re: 2017 ICT general discussion

Post by theMoMA »

I'd like to acknowledge my fellow set editors Seth and Andrew, Ike and Billy for providing feedback and edits on large swaths of the set, and Matt Jackson, Will Alston, Austin Brownlow, and Zeke Berdichevsky for their writing. Looking through the writing and subject-editing stats, I'd also like to acknowledge Matt Weiner, Danny Vopava, Jason Thompson, Travis Vitello, Richard Yu, Kyle Haddad-Fonda, and Jonathan Magin for their contributions.

This was my first year as a "first-eyes editor" on the ICT set, and production went very smoothly thanks to the proactive efforts of our writers and editors. Andrew deserves a huge amount of credit for coordinating early edits nearly a year ago, as do the writers who were writing large chunks of the set throughout the year. I think the set turned out very nicely, and I hope the players agree.
Andrew Hart
Minnesota alum
User avatar
Auroni
Auron
Posts: 3145
Joined: Thu Nov 15, 2007 6:23 pm

Re: 2017 ICT general discussion

Post by Auroni »

This was indeed the best and most accessible ICT I've ever played. It had sensible answerlines and cluing without sacrificing the (at times eccentric) NAQT flavor.
Auroni Gupta (she/her)
User avatar
Santa Claus
Rikku
Posts: 285
Joined: Fri Aug 23, 2013 10:58 pm

Re: 2017 ICT general discussion

Post by Santa Claus »

I suppose this is the best place to put this:

Currently this video is unlisted - you cannot find it by searching Youtube. Once there are no longer any mirrors or anything of that sort, I'll just make it public.

Also someone mentioned adding subtitles to this; that would take a long time and I'll only do it if there's a real reason to do it.

Link removed until the remaining mirrors are finished --JTH
Kevin Wang
Arcadia High School 2015
Amherst College 2019

2018 PACE NSC Champion
2019 PACE NSC Champion
User avatar
setht
Auron
Posts: 1205
Joined: Mon Oct 18, 2004 2:41 pm
Location: Columbus, Ohio

Re: 2017 ICT general discussion

Post by setht »

theMoMA wrote:I'd like to acknowledge my fellow set editors Seth and Andrew, Ike and Billy for providing feedback and edits on large swaths of the set, and Matt Jackson, Will Alston, Austin Brownlow, and Zeke Berdichevsky for their writing.
I want to add that on top of their valuable DI set editing help, Ike and Billy both wrote lots of great questions. In particular, Ike wrote over 200 questions—more than a quarter of the set. And Billy also did a bunch of set editing work on the DII science questions.

-Seth
Seth Teitler
Formerly UC Berkeley and U. Chicago
President of NAQT
Emeritus member of ACF
bradleykirksey
Wakka
Posts: 187
Joined: Sat Nov 12, 2011 5:09 pm

Re: 2017 ICT general discussion

Post by bradleykirksey »

First off, I had a ton of fun, and I appreciate all of the effort and love that goes into a set like this. There were several answerlines that really popped out at me as creative and interesting. My teammates loved the common link Michael Scott tossup, the Florida circuit at large really liked the Hillary Clinton one, and I had a good laugh at the trash tossup on Booth.

Second, I'm a bad quiz bowl player. 7.25 PPG at ICT means that I'm not good and probably won't ever be. So my perspective is probably less important than nearly everyone else posting on here.

But personally, hearing 8 hours of really hard tossups is pretty draining. I'm convinced we could have won that last game if any of us were "all there". Hard quiz bowl is just emotionally draining, at least if you're not a top team, and I think that tends to get worse with answerlines like Time Passes (1-9), the Taurus Mountains (1-11), or magnetars (1-22). If I'm listening to answerlines like Virginia Woolf, Turkey, and neutron stars, I feel like I'm learning something, and it's just far less frustrating and dejecting. I understand that that limits your options a bit, and it runs the risk of repeating answerlines more from year to year, but those tossups could still have most of the same clues and feel like they're more accessible and like you're learning something, in addition to having more forgiving FTPs if you'd like that.

That's my two cents at least. If the top bracket teams have more fun answering things like Lu Xun (2-4) and Alvin Ailey (2-12), then I think it makes more practical and business sense to do it. Just, that's my opinion.

Also, don't tell Chris or Stan that I said this, but this year really underscored the difference between the main DII teams and the CC teams, I think. All of the CCs except Chipola went winless before lunch. It's not quite the Paul Kelson and Cassandra Logan era, I don't think, when it went from 6 to 4 teams. If you moved it down to 3 teams, it might allow a more qualified team to enter DII and it would add a lot more to that otherwise meaningless 3rd place game at CCCT.
Bradley Kirksey
Mayor of quiz bowl at the University of Central Florida (2010-2015)
The club at Reformed Theology Seminary Orlando (2017 - 2021)
Borrowing 100,000 Arrows
Wakka
Posts: 145
Joined: Sun Feb 19, 2017 11:29 pm

Re: 2017 ICT general discussion

Post by Borrowing 100,000 Arrows »

I really enjoyed this set (even if I kinda played like trash.) It did a great job of balancing accessibility with interesting new canon-expanding content. However, in the future, I would like to see NAQT make geography easier across the board. I think the majority of our zeroed bonuses at this tournament came on bonuses where we had to name a Canadian National Park or the longest Laotian river or whatever to get ten points. I realize geography is going to be a permanent fixture at ICT, but I would prefer geography questions that are still answerable by teams that don't have their own Kenji or Isaac.
Caleb K.
Maryland '24, Oklahoma '18, Norman North '15
User avatar
naan/steak-holding toll
Auron
Posts: 2515
Joined: Mon Feb 28, 2011 11:53 pm
Location: New York, NY

Re: 2017 ICT general discussion

Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

bradleykirksey wrote: Second, I'm a bad quiz bowl player. 7.25 PPG at ICT means that I'm not good and probably won't ever be. So my perspective is probably less important than nearly everyone else posting on here.

But personally, hearing 8 hours of really hard tossups is pretty draining. I'm convinced we could have won that last game if any of us were "all there". Hard quiz bowl is just emotionally draining, at least if you're not a top team, and I think that tends to get worse with answerlines like Time Passes (1-9), the Taurus Mountains (1-11), or magnetars (1-22). If I'm listening to answerlines like Virginia Woolf, Turkey, and neutron stars, I feel like I'm learning something, and it's just far less frustrating and dejecting. I understand that that limits your options a bit, and it runs the risk of repeating answerlines more from year to year, but those tossups could still have most of the same clues and feel like they're more accessible and like you're learning something, in addition to having more forgiving FTPs if you'd like that.

That's my two cents at least. If the top bracket teams have more fun answering things like Lu Xun (2-4) and Alvin Ailey (2-12), then I think it makes more practical and business sense to do it. Just, that's my opinion.
Well, your perspective is important - writers and editors need feedback from players of all different skill levels in order to make sure their product is meeting its goals of differentiating teams. There could be no place where this is more important than the national championship!

That being said, ICT and ACF Nationals aren't supposed to be tournaments where you can get by on knowing a small range of topics - they're supposed to determine the national champion at the college level! If the usable canon were as restricted as, say, PACE NSC, then - even if you made the cluing of the questions far harder, if you restricted the answer difficulty it would be necessary to scale the detail level of the tossups to the point of triviality because the top college players would just go insanely in-depth on those few topics.

Certainly, there are lots of questions on core topics and not-challenging answers - in fact, I think quizbowl in the past few years has been better at asking about "core" topics at a high level than it ever was before. It's way better than in 2009, when Matt Weiner wrote an excellent post about this topic.

If ICT is being brutally punishing to teams, then that's something to be concerned about. Looking at the statistics for the teams at the bottom of the field, the average PPB is over 10 for teams in the bottom bracket, which is better than a lot of regular difficulty tournaments. Teams in the middle brackets have PPB ranging from 11.80 to 18.03, and the top team got 20.38. This honestly looks a lot better than a number of ICTs from the past. I think a big part of that is the set being more forgiving/accessible for weaker teams (in terms of easy parts and bonus structure). On the other hand, it may be a concern that a lot of tossups seem to be going dead in the bottom bracket - for example, it looks like only 12 tossups were converted in the UCF - Washington game, and this probably isn't just due to the clock.
Steph Curry-Dwight Howard Isomorphism wrote:However, in the future, I would like to see NAQT make geography easier across the board. I think the majority of our zeroed bonuses at this tournament came on bonuses where we had to name a Canadian National Park or the longest Laotian river or whatever to get ten points. I realize geography is going to be a permanent fixture at ICT, but I would prefer geography questions that are still answerable by teams that don't have their own Kenji or Isaac.
While I think there's something here about quizbowl being weirdly obsessed with Canadian national parks, I really don't think this case has much merit. Geography players are not magical fruit that fall from the sky - geography, like any other quizbowl subject, can be learned. In fact, I personally think it's probably one of the most accessible subjects you can ask about, since you naturally learn things about geography in many humanities disciplines (especially history) and even from biology/earth science as well! If players can summit the heights of difficulty in analytic philosophy or organic chemistry, surely they can learn to similarly scale in geography as well.
Will Alston
Dartmouth College '16
Columbia Business School '21
User avatar
John Ketzkorn
Wakka
Posts: 197
Joined: Tue Oct 08, 2013 2:54 pm

Re: 2017 ICT general discussion

Post by John Ketzkorn »

Periplus of the Erythraean Sea wrote: While I think there's something here about quizbowl being weirdly obsessed with Canadian national parks, I really don't think this case has much merit. Geography players are not magical fruit that fall from the sky - geography, like any other quizbowl subject, can be learned. In fact, I personally think it's probably one of the most accessible subjects you can ask about, since you naturally learn things about geography in many humanities disciplines (especially history) and even from biology/earth science as well! If players can summit the heights of difficulty in analytic philosophy or organic chemistry, surely they can learn to similarly scale in geography as well.
I'd like to add that I have had upwards of two good geography buzzes in my career thanks to literary works being set there.
Steph Curry-Dwight Howard Isomorphism wrote:I would like to see NAQT make geography easier across the board. I think the majority of our zeroed bonuses at this tournament came on bonuses where we had to name a Canadian National Park or the longest Laotian river or whatever to get ten points.
I do believe that NAQT would work to make bonuses on geography easier if data showed ppb is significantly lower in that category.
Michael Etzkorn
Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy '16
UIUC '21
Charbroil
Auron
Posts: 1146
Joined: Fri Jun 09, 2006 11:52 am
Location: St. Charles, MO

Re: 2017 ICT general discussion

Post by Charbroil »

John Ketzkorn wrote:
Steph Curry-Dwight Howard Isomorphism wrote:I would like to see NAQT make geography easier across the board. I think the majority of our zeroed bonuses at this tournament came on bonuses where we had to name a Canadian National Park or the longest Laotian river or whatever to get ten points.
I do believe that NAQT would work to make bonuses on geography easier if data showed ppb is significantly lower in that category.
Does NAQT release category conversion data for ICT the same way it does for HSNCT? If not, it seems like that would be a nice thing to be able to see.
Charles Hang
Francis Howell Central '09
St. Charles Community College '14
Washington University in St. Louis '19, 2x (President, 2017-19)

Owner, Olympia Academic Competition Questions, LLC
Question Writer, National Academic Quiz Tournaments, LLC and National History Bee and Bowl
jonah
Auron
Posts: 2383
Joined: Thu Jul 20, 2006 5:51 pm
Location: Chicago

Re: 2017 ICT general discussion

Post by jonah »

Charbroil wrote:Does NAQT release category conversion data for ICT the same way it does for HSNCT? If not, it seems like that would be a nice thing to be able to see.
We don't have a formal policy on that, but generally speaking we're happy to share reasonable amounts of data we collect. That said, it'll be a while before the scoresheets are tabulated (probably sometime in the summer).
Jonah Greenthal
National Academic Quiz Tournaments
Locked