grapesmoker wrote:Attending this event has made me think that NAQT doesn't care what the better players think of its questions. It cares mostly about catering to (what it thinks is) the tastes of the 3/4ths of the field that isn't going to complain about question quality, and it feels secure in its knowledge that that other 1/4th that actually cares will just show up anyway, because hey, it's a national championship.
Jeff, that's like having a tournament that contains 3/3 physics and me saying, "I don't see the problem with 3/3 physics because I can answer those questions."
Geography is a niche distribution that should have 1/1 per round.
sbkinney wrote:The cost was relatively high. However, NAQT does provide transportation and lodging for volunteers to help ensure that quality moderators are present. I think that this policy helps ensure that more experienced and competent staff are present than you might find at your typical tournament. It also allows for the massive number of trophies which NAQT awards. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't recall nearly as many awards being given out at ACF Nats in 2004. It would be nice if the cost could be cut some, but I don't think that the current cost is unreasonably high.
sbkinney wrote:However, if NAQT made the changes many of the most vocal dissidents suggest, I would almost certainly cease to participate. Let ACF be ACF, let NAQT be NAQT, and let CBI be CBI. If all three events were the same, there'd be no point in having three national events.
ekwartler wrote:Really? Trophies? I got one last year at ICT, it was a little plastic plaque that said something about my place individually in D2. Maybe this is my "ACF bias," and maybe it's self-righteous, but I don't need pieces of plastic to tell me how well or not well I did at a tournament. Most academic tournaments--including SCT--we run and that I've gone to in other regions give out books (mostly cheaply purchased at used book stores or donated) as prizes. Regardless of that, there were no trophies at ACF nationals this year, and I personally heard no complaints. Perhaps next year, just in case, I'll bring cookies in case the winners want one on top of the respect and congratulations they get from their peers.
yoda4554 wrote:I also think that questions such as the "barbershop quartet" one are good precisely because they reward knowledge, while one can't prepare for them.
Chris Frankel wrote:I think Eric may be a little harsh on the trophy issue, not in the sense that your average player needs a trophy for validation, but in the sense that it can be a reasonably interesting way of presenting awards, and in the sense that those things can have some good in terms of impressing administrative types for the sake funding future club endeavors. But that said, it probably is worth questioning whether it makes sense to provide trophies to the fourth place undergrad individual scorer or the tenth place D2 scorer if the costs are such that an entry fee twice what the most expensive circuit tournament may charge is necessary.
setht wrote:Before I start commenting on the questions, I want to comment on the issue of protests. My team wasn't involved in any game-deciding protests, but we did run into multiple protests in the course of our games. From what I've heard, it seems there were many protests through the course of the tournament, and it also seems that at least some of these protests were not resolved in a very satisfactory manner. I think there were several questions that were missing some alternate answers that should have been there; if this is the case, that's obviously something to work on for next time. Ultimately, NAQT should set a clear protest-resolution policy, make sure the teams and staff are aware of it, and then stick to it at all times.
setht wrote:-none of the bonuses felt like completely free 30s (there were certainly plenty of 30s on bonuses, but none of the bonuses felt ridiculous)
ValenciaQBowl wrote: To their credit, NAQT brass were emphatic about accurate scoresheet marking, as they want to investigate "answerability" of questions, so maybe that will help for future tournaments.
Ryan Westbrook wrote:I want to say something in response to this crucially true idea that naqt produces wild and aberrant single-game results. It's true that at any good acf tournament (see this year's nats), there are some "upsets." The difference for me is that after losing an acf round like that, you feel as though you deserved to lose it - i.e. you didn't buzz where you should have, you did buzz and said the wrong things, etc. When you lose those types of rounds at ict for example (assuming the existence of the type of defects that have been hashed out in this post already), often you're more inclined to just shrug your shoulders and think "huh, that was quick, how did that happen."
E.T. Chuck wrote:This tells you I haven't been to ICT since it was run at Chapel Hill...
When did ICT go to a prelim bracket format? Whatever happened to power-matching every round all the time because of the inherent problems associated with "arbitrarily" assigning teams into divisions?
Am I the only one who misses ladder play?
grapesmoker wrote:When I approached R. Hentzel during the tournament and expressed my dissatisfaction with the questions, I got a brief nod for my troubles and no indication whether anything I had said (and I hadn't had a chance to go into detail) would be taken into account.
Dan Greenstein wrote:E.T. Chuck wrote:This tells you I haven't been to ICT since it was run at Chapel Hill...
When did ICT go to a prelim bracket format? Whatever happened to power-matching every round all the time because of the inherent problems associated with "arbitrarily" assigning teams into divisions?
Am I the only one who misses ladder play?
ICT has had the 4x8 bracketing system since 2004. They also had a variant of that system in 2001 and 2002, wherein the fields were divided 3x12 (in D1) and the playoffs consisted of four games cross-bracket (6x6).
In 2003, NAQT did some weird power-matching scheme that will probably not be repeated because the third place team got there by virtue of winning their last seven games despite losing to the fifth place team, thanks to a fortuitious draw in the last four games.
NoahMinkCHS wrote:Re: Swiss pairing, I would like to see it. After playing it for two years at HSNCT, I have to say I think it's a much better system than bracketed pools. It helps prevent stacked divisions (as were mentioned above) from skewing the results, and it makes the games much more intense on the whole. I know (in general) that I enjoyed the later rounds on Sat, where we played teams of even caliber, much more than the Fri/Sat AM rounds, where opponent quality was a crapshoot.
That said, it reminds me of another question I've been meaning to ask. My team (Georgia, Div II) lost 2 prelim matches to fall to the second pool. We then proceeded to almost run the table, losing only our final match in a blowout to Columbia. My question is this: If we'd beaten Columbia, we would have been 11-2... same as Harvard, Stanford and Caltech, the teams that played off for the 1st-3rd place spots. Based on my interpretation of the rules, that would have put us in a four-way tie for first. Am I right? If so, is this fair, given that we'd played only two top-bracket opponents versus seven for the other contenders? I know NAQT has very specific tie-breaking and playoff rules to eliminate... "weird" outcomes, but it seems like this one could have been a problem. (Which is why I liked the HS rules of Swiss-pair followed by double-elim playoff...) Any thoughts?
If so, is this fair, given that we'd played only two top-bracket opponents versus seven for the other contenders? I know NAQT has very specific tie-breaking and playoff rules to eliminate... "weird" outcomes, but it seems like this one could have been a problem. (Which is why I liked the HS rules of Swiss-pair followed by double-elim playoff...) Any thoughts?
cvdwightw wrote:(2) This is the second straight year where the brackets were distributed quite unevenly. Seriously, what was NAQT doing putting Chicago A, Berkeley, Rochester, Williams, Harvard, and Texas A&M in the same bracket? Or (slightly less egregious, but more personally annoying) Illinois, UCLA, Princeton, Texas, and Yale?
matt979 wrote:The main issue relates to how we treat teams that auto-qualified from hosting an SCT: There's no way to give them a specific ranking without resorting to some hand-waving, but hand-waving may still be superior to a demonstrably unfair result. This is obviously a problem we need to solve post-haste, since we do want the best possible SCT hosts, and the teams that do best at running tournaments are often (not always, but often) also the teams that play best.
Of course imbalance can also result from teams whose rosters change significantly from the lineup that played SCT to the one that plays ICT. Anyone with non-obvious insight about what adjustments (if any) to make, should write to ict at naqt.
matt979 wrote:Since I was notionally on the protest committee I'll take my share of responsibility for the Arminius/Herman resolution. My part in the conversation was limited to hearing Yaphe's assertion that the theologian was known only as Arminius. If Matt W. asserted otherwise then we should have researched that. (I don't know whether he made that assertion.) I can tell you there was also a biology protest that round in need of factual research, though that wouldn't excuse failing also to research some other factual protest.
jagluski wrote:You are not correct. All teams in the top bracket must finish ahead of the first place team in the 2nd bracket. Therefore, making the first bracket guarantees you 8th place. Even if you ran the table, you would have done no better than 9th.
NAQT wrote:...the top two teams will advance to the finals. This will be determined by overall record (i.e., teams' records from the first round-robin carry over).
vandyhawk wrote:One other thing I wanted to bring up is the 2 second response rule. Does anyone else think that's too short? ... ... ... I thought I'd see how others like the quick response requirement.
It might help if the complainers on this board could agree on two or three problems that they see as serious. There is nothing wrong with complaining on a bulletin board, but certainly you can see why it is difficult for NAQT, which basically runs a successful tournament, to respond in a satisfactory way to all of these complaints.
Third, I don't blame NAQT for the fiasco with the rooms. I don't understand how Maryland could have booked the rooms without knowing they were double-booked. When Casey was running around trying to figure out what to do, it seemed to me that this scenario was not entirely unanticipated by him. In that case, why not start the tournament in Jimenez to begin with, since there appeared to be no chance of interference in that situation? Regardless, I didn't find that delay particularly bad; at most it was an annoyance.
ReinsteinD wrote:It might help if the complainers on this board could agree on two or three problems that they see as serious. There is nothing wrong with complaining on a bulletin board, but certainly you can see why it is difficult for NAQT, which basically runs a successful tournament, to respond in a satisfactory way to all of these complaints.
Romero wrote:I know that I am thankful that college quiz bowl has ReinsteinD to sort out our issues for us. How would any of us deal with the complexity without his leadership. Perhaps we should appoint him head of a new college players association (modelled on his Illinois coaches association).
"but NAQT does get good people to write and edit their questions" ... HOW DO YOU KNOW?
Just out of curiosity, ReinsteinD do you have ANY connection to the college game? Pardon me if I think your opinions on the college game in general or the ICT specifically are worthless. Hell most of your opinions on the high school game are half-baked.
And just in case this is not clear...the proper reply to this post is silence. I look forward to a continued discussion of the merits of ICT and the NAQT college game from those people with direct connections to it.
grapesmoker wrote:First of all, maybe you can tell me whether the above accusations have been leveled at any of the ACF tournaments this year or other outstanding events like MLK. The fact that they have not is, I think, indicative of the relative quality of the aforementioned events as compared with ICT.
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