NAQT, ACF, and other alphabet soup

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NAQT, ACF, and other alphabet soup

Post by Matt Weiner »

This topic is for explaining what the two major organizations in collegiate quizbowl, NAQT and ACF, are all about, as well as for quickly decoding any other acronyms or jargon that you come across.
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Re: NAQT, ACF, and other alphabet soup

Post by Auroni »

NAQT (National Academic Quiz Tournaments, LLC) is a company which produces several sets of questions for the high school level (invitational series and invitational series - A). At the collegiate level, they hold two events called sectionals (SCT) and the intercollegiate tournament (ICT). At each tournament, schools can compete in one of two divisions, and after a certain point, they lose their eligibility for D2 and must play on D1.

ACF (Academic Competition Federation) is an independent quizbowl company which doesn't produce sets of any kind for hosting tournaments, but does host 3 tournaments per year (4 starting next year): ACF Fall, ACF Winter, ACF Regionals, and ACF Nationals, in rising order of difficulty. There are undergraduate/D2 (for newer teams) and D1 titles in ACF, and in order to participate in an ACF tournament in most cases, a team has to write a packet and submit it to the editors.

A tournament is mACF if it follows the ACF standard of clue density and question formatting. Many mACF events are packet submission (meaning every team submits a packet), but some can be housewritten.
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Re: NAQT, ACF, and other alphabet soup

Post by Matt Weiner »

The Structure of SoCal Action wrote:NAQT (National Academic Quiz Tournaments, LLC) is a company which produces several sets of questions for the high school level (invitational series and invitational series - A). At the collegiate level, they hold two events called sectionals (SCT) and the intercollegiate tournament (ICT). At each tournament, schools can compete in one of two divisions, and after a certain point, they lose their eligibility for D2 and must play on D1.

ACF (Academic Competition Federation) is an independent quizbowl company which doesn't produce sets of any kind for hosting tournaments, but does host 3 tournaments per year (4 starting next year): ACF Fall, ACF Winter, ACF Regionals, and ACF Nationals, in rising order of difficulty. There are undergraduate/D2 (for newer teams) and D1 titles in ACF, and in order to participate in an ACF tournament in most cases, a team has to write a packet and submit it to the editors.

A tournament is mACF if it follows the ACF standard of clue density and question formatting. Many mACF events are packet submission (meaning every team submits a packet), but some can be housewritten.
Just to clarify on this, with respect to new teams:

ACF, of course, does offer its three regular-season collegiate tournaments to interested hosts. What Auroni means it that it does not produce sets for high school tournaments.

You are not required to write a packet for an ACF tournament if all of your players are in their first or second year of mainstream quizbowl.

The term "mACF" is falling out of favor, since all tournaments at the collegiate level use the 20/20 untimed format except for actual NAQT events. So, it's not a very useful term in that it doesn't distinguish the tournaments it applies to from any other tournaments. Generally, you should look more at who is editing a given invitational, rather than at format announcements, in order to determine the character of the tournament.
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Re: NAQT, ACF, and other alphabet soup

Post by Ondes Martenot »

Out of curiosity, when a tournament says it will be "regular difficulty", is that equivalent to the difficulty of ACF regionals?
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Re: NAQT, ACF, and other alphabet soup

Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

In my experience, it usually is an approximation of regionals difficulty (or, regionals is an approximation of what people call regular, depending on which way you look at it). However, these tournaments can fluctuate all over as well. For instance, ACF regionals 2007 was harder than what most people called "regular," and there are plenty of "regular" tournaments that end up harder than regionals (or significantly easier).
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Re: NAQT, ACF, and other alphabet soup

Post by Gautam »

TIT 2008 was a good "regular difficulty" tournament as were 2007 Titanomachy and 2008 ACF Regionals.
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Re: NAQT, ACF, and other alphabet soup

Post by Auks Ran Ova »

Also, 2007 and 2008 Penn Bowl, though 2008's was probably a bit harder.
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Re: NAQT, ACF, and other alphabet soup

Post by Coach Jim »

While I'm familar with College Bowl, NAQT, and now ACF, I'm still learning about "trash" tournaments. Can someone please explain the type of questions and format used at these tournaments?
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Re: NAQT, ACF, and other alphabet soup

Post by Auks Ran Ova »

Coach Jim wrote:While I'm familar with College Bowl, NAQT, and now ACF, I'm still learning about "trash" tournaments. Can someone please explain the type of questions and format used at these tournaments?
Trash tournaments are composed entirely of questions on pop culture (sports, tv/movies, music, video games, etc.) and generally follow the standard ACF/mACF format.
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Re: NAQT, ACF, and other alphabet soup

Post by at your pleasure »

They should also not be confused with TRASH(Testing Recall About Strange Happenings), which writes two "regionals/nationals" trash tournaments per year.
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Re: NAQT, ACF, and other alphabet soup

Post by Auks Ran Ova »

Doink the Clown wrote:They should also not be confused with TRASH(Testing Recall About Strange Happenings), which writes two "regionals/nationals" trash tournaments per year.
To clarify this, "TRASH tournaments" is a subset of "trash tournaments". TRASH tournaments have tended to be somewhat lacking in question quality, though they have shown improvement.
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Re: NAQT, ACF, and other alphabet soup

Post by Important Bird Area »

The 2005 TRASH regionals and TRASHionals are available on the archive.
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Re: NAQT, ACF, and other alphabet soup

Post by ... and the chaos of Mexican modernity »

Coach Jim wrote:
Not meaning to take this off topic, but Mr. Nutter, do you know if some of the other Big South teams have made an attempt to learn about ACF? I believe there is a NAQT tournament for Big South teams right?
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Re: NAQT, ACF, and other alphabet soup

Post by tiwonge »

The Mountie wrote:
Coach Jim wrote:
Not meaning to take this off topic, but Mr. Nutter, do you know if some of the other Big South teams have made an attempt to learn about ACF? I believe there is a NAQT tournament for Big South teams right?
How exactly do you get a Big South tournament? Who sponsors it? Who organizes it? Where was/is it held?

Getting a conference affiliation behind quiz bowl might be neat, although I can't expect it to catch on in the WAC. That's a lot of traveling that would have to happen. (Although, if Hawaii were to host a winter tournament...)
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Re: NAQT, ACF, and other alphabet soup

Post by Frater Taciturnus »

tiwonge wrote:
The Mountie wrote:
Coach Jim wrote:
Not meaning to take this off topic, but Mr. Nutter, do you know if some of the other Big South teams have made an attempt to learn about ACF? I believe there is a NAQT tournament for Big South teams right?
How exactly do you get a Big South tournament? Who sponsors it? Who organizes it? Where was/is it held?

Getting a conference affiliation behind quiz bowl might be neat, although I can't expect it to catch on in the WAC. That's a lot of traveling that would have to happen. (Although, if Hawaii were to host a winter tournament...)
Best results for this I can find are here
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Re: NAQT, ACF, and other alphabet soup

Post by Mike Bentley »

tiwonge wrote:
The Mountie wrote:
Coach Jim wrote:
Not meaning to take this off topic, but Mr. Nutter, do you know if some of the other Big South teams have made an attempt to learn about ACF? I believe there is a NAQT tournament for Big South teams right?
How exactly do you get a Big South tournament? Who sponsors it? Who organizes it? Where was/is it held?

Getting a conference affiliation behind quiz bowl might be neat, although I can't expect it to catch on in the WAC. That's a lot of traveling that would have to happen. (Although, if Hawaii were to host a winter tournament...)
I've heard some talk about the student union people who organized the CBI stuff in the Northwest doing something with NAQT this year. Although I heard the same thing last year. I imagine the best outcome you can really hope for is an IS tournament they pay for and maybe them paying for the winner to go the ICT.
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Re: NAQT, ACF, and other alphabet soup

Post by Camelopardalis »

PN News wrote:
tiwonge wrote:
The Mountie wrote:
Coach Jim wrote:
Not meaning to take this off topic, but Mr. Nutter, do you know if some of the other Big South teams have made an attempt to learn about ACF? I believe there is a NAQT tournament for Big South teams right?
How exactly do you get a Big South tournament? Who sponsors it? Who organizes it? Where was/is it held?

Getting a conference affiliation behind quiz bowl might be neat, although I can't expect it to catch on in the WAC. That's a lot of traveling that would have to happen. (Although, if Hawaii were to host a winter tournament...)
Best results for this I can find are here
This looks like results, unless there were two "Big South" tournaments held on February 7, 2009. Also, mention of past results here.
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Re: NAQT, ACF, and other alphabet soup

Post by tiwonge »

Camelopardalis wrote:
PN News wrote:
tiwonge wrote:
The Mountie wrote:
Coach Jim wrote:
Not meaning to take this off topic, but Mr. Nutter, do you know if some of the other Big South teams have made an attempt to learn about ACF? I believe there is a NAQT tournament for Big South teams right?
How exactly do you get a Big South tournament? Who sponsors it? Who organizes it? Where was/is it held?

Getting a conference affiliation behind quiz bowl might be neat, although I can't expect it to catch on in the WAC. That's a lot of traveling that would have to happen. (Although, if Hawaii were to host a winter tournament...)
Best results for this I can find are here
This looks like results, unless there were two "Big South" tournaments held on February 7, 2009. Also, mention of past results here.
OK, that second link answers my question. The Big South has an "Academic Consortium." I wonder who I can talk to in the WAC to get something like that.
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Re: NAQT, ACF, and other alphabet soup

Post by Matt Weiner »

tiwonge wrote:OK, that second link answers my question. The Big South has an "Academic Consortium." I wonder who I can talk to in the WAC to get something like that.
Unless you want them to schedule a tournament on high school questions on the day of Sectionals, hopefully no one.
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Re: NAQT, ACF, and other alphabet soup

Post by tiwonge »

Matt Weiner wrote:
tiwonge wrote:OK, that second link answers my question. The Big South has an "Academic Consortium." I wonder who I can talk to in the WAC to get something like that.
Unless you want them to schedule a tournament on high school questions on the day of Sectionals, hopefully no one.
Something like that. Not that, itself.

I'm just trying to think of anything I can do to get more schools in the region involved. I'm happy to see two new schools will be at EFT. (Michael, was that your doing?) I haven't had much luck trying to encourage people at other schools to start teams (with the exception of Gonzaga, I guess; I kept in touch with Emily after the last CBI tournament).
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Re: NAQT, ACF, and other alphabet soup

Post by Important Bird Area »

Matt Weiner wrote:Unless you want them to schedule a tournament on high school questions on the day of Sectionals, hopefully no one.
I'll go on record as saying I have no idea why we did this; obviously the right solution would have been to give them the DII SCT set, which is not that much harder, and then let the winner have the chance to come to ICT. I suspect this is what we would do for any such conference event that wanted to host on that date in the future.
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Re: NAQT, ACF, and other alphabet soup

Post by tiwonge »

I went to the WAC webpage and sent a message to the "commissioner" (probably just an intern or something) and got this in reply:
Karl Benson to Colin

Dear Colin:

Thanks for your message. I am sure if there were several other WAC schools that sponsored Quiz Bowl teams that the WAC would be very interested in being involved. So if you are willing to take the lead and try to organize something within the WAC, just let me know.

Good luck and best wishes.
The problem is that I don't think that there are any other WAC schools with teams. Oh, wait, does San Jose State? What about Fresno State? NMSU, Idaho and Utah State did have CBI teams. Then there's the travel involved; WAC schools are pretty spread out. I don't know if WAC sponsorship means they'd help out with funding.
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Re: NAQT, ACF, and other alphabet soup

Post by Important Bird Area »

tiwonge wrote:The problem is that I don't think that there are any other WAC schools with teams. Oh, wait, does San Jose State? What about Fresno State?
Fresno State has had a team; I don't know how active they are right now. I've never heard of a program at San Jose State.
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Re: NAQT, ACF, and other alphabet soup

Post by AKKOLADE »

Bringing qb under the purview of a group with no ties to qb is always a bad move. Don't do this!
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Re: NAQT, ACF, and other alphabet soup

Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

Yeah, this is a terrible idea.
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Re: NAQT, ACF, and other alphabet soup

Post by nobthehobbit »

FredMorlan wrote:Bringing qb under the purview of a group with no ties to qb is always a bad move. Don't do this!
I have to agree. I'd be more disinclined than I am now to attend a QB event in Washington in any capacity if it were being run by such an organization. Right now my only real barriers are travel, time and money, but if I did go, at least someone who's played before would be running the show, and not someone who has no actual interest in the game. And if it were being run by the group that used to do CBI, I'd be yet more disinclined.
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Re: NAQT, ACF, and other alphabet soup

Post by tiwonge »

If it were to happen, I'd imagine it would be something like the Big South thing--an NAQT packet/rules/tournament, among member schools, with the WAC recognizing the winner.

But, I'll bow to your experience. I've got enough on my plate that I don't need to try to do something like that. I was just thinking ways to encourage other schools to get involved. It's probably not feasible for our conference, either, because of distances involved.
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Re: NAQT, ACF, and other alphabet soup

Post by Captain Sinico »

I don't really see how this could hurt, if it's being run by quizbowl people (obviously, I can hurt very badly otherwise, c.f. CBI.) Conversely, I think it could help a lot. I'd say see what you can get out of this opportunity.

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