Questions from a rookie

[HornetGuy]

I am new to this forum, so please excuse my ignorance. I am a middle school scholar bowl coach. We have nine schools in our conference. None of the schools compete in any type of state or national competitions; our conference is simply nine schools that play each other. We are looking for a new source of question sets for our competitions. We formerly used a company that has been absorbed by another company and we are now exploring our options for question sets. I have seen some of the middle school sample sets posted on this site. They look pretty good. Where were those sets purchased? What is the cost? Are they writing new sets? Any information you can provide for this newbie is greatly appreciated.

User was reminded to enable a signature. --Mgmt.

[Golran]

Welcome to the forums!

One provider you may want to look at is NAQT; while their questions are not typically posted on-line, they do have a sample packet. One benefit of running your league on NAQT questions is that your league becomes a qualifier for the Middle School National Championship Tournament- even if the top team in your league doesn't want to attend nationals, this will open the door for them. Also, their customer service is top notch.

Regarding other sets, many of the middle school sets have become annual productions, with their date of availability typically around the same point each year. You should feel free to contact the writers of any of those sets to ask when it becomes available, and if they will be in production the next year. A set that comes to mind is the SCOP Middle School set which has been high quality and produced annually for around 6? years now.

Costs will typically vary based on the number of teams playing. It looks like NAQT now charges $85 plus $11 per team in attendance, but you get $50 back for submitting statistics to them. Other groups will have similar price structures.

[jonah]

Welcome to the forum!

I'm not aware of any companies, other than the one you are currently using, that write questions in IESA format. My company, National Academic Quiz Tournaments (NAQT), writes middle school questions in the national format. You can see a sample here; the main difference is that the bonuses are all three parts, and are designed so that you answer the first part right after it is read, then read the second part and answer it, then read the third part and answer it (which means that the second part might mention the answer to the first part, etc.). Also, the subject distribution is quite a bit different.

Many of the other people on this forum have bought our middle school questions, and I hope they will share their feelings about them here.

Our standard pricing for conferences is a $85 base fee (from which we will deduct $50 when you send us the score of each game after the conference concludes) plus $11 per team, so assuming you send us the results the cost would be $134. That gets you 10 rounds of questions, each with 24 tossups and 24 bonuses. Please feel free to give us a call at 888-411-6278 ("NAQT") and you'll talk to a super friendly guy named Chad who will be happy to answer all your questions.

[Stained Diviner]

If you are talking about the Collaborative Middle School Tournament, then you are unfortunately looking for something that no longer exists.

Two options to look into are NAQT (as Jonah already said) and SAGES.

[alexdz]

Hi, I'm the owner/editor for SAGES that was just mentioned above. Right now, I'm trying to finish grad school and looking for new jobs, so I'm not sure if I'll be producing anything new in the very near future. But I'm definitely willing to explore options to work with you. Don't hesitate to get in touch. sagesquizbowl /at/ gmail [dot] com