The Quizbowl Resource Center

Carlos Be

Apparently there have been rumors spreading around that Saturnalia as difficult as 2019 NSC or close to it. Although there are a few outlier answerlines that would not be out of place in 2019 NSC, it is clear from the stats that Saturnalia as a whole is significantly easier. For instance, the UIUC m...

Carlos Be

Seeing as general registration for ICT opens on February 8th (and teams that register would have to confirm their interest a week after registering) will ACF release more detailed information about nationals before then? In particular, it would be helpful to know: - What date will it be? Here it say...

Carlos Be

We have made decisions on all of the writer apps. If you have not already been notified of your acceptance, then you have not been accepted. We will respond to everyone who has been rejected with a couple points of feedback on their sample, hopefully within the next few days.

Carlos Be

We have received over 50 applications, included 18 today and 6 in the last five minutes before midnight. Unfortunately given this sheer number we will have to reject quite a few applicants. We hope to respond to everyone who applied within the week.

Carlos Be

Tomorrow is the last day to apply as a writer. Remember to get your apps in before 11:59 pm, or else they will not be considered.

Carlos Be

Will there be a second open mirror of IKEA and/or a closed mirror for teams who couldn't play at their regional site?

Carlos Be

This is a reminder that the deadline to apply as a writer is January 10th. No writer applications submitted after that date will be read. For editors, everyone who submits before January 10th will be considered, though we may extend the editor deadline if not enough people apply.

Carlos Be

This is a really bad idea. Having objective eligibility restrictions, as I did for SUN, is good. Just because ACF tournaments do not have them, does not mean that this tournament should not utilize them. In the past, players have repeatedly failed to show sound judgement when determining whether th...

Carlos Be

A second iteration of CALISTO, a HS regs set, will be ready for mirrors beginning in Fall of 2021. I will be head editor, and many other editors of CALISTO 1 will be working on CALISTO 2 in some capacity. We aim to produce generally accessible questions that nonetheless reward players for engaging w...

Carlos Be

We're still looking for mirrors in a number of circuits, including New England and the DC metro area. Please reach out to us if you would like to host Saturnalia in a circuit that does not already have a mirror. For circuits where we cannot find a host, we will either host the mirror ourselves or we...

Carlos Be

I condemn the idea that anti-packet submission is anti-quizbowl. While the president likes to take discourse down the slippery slope and argue that all his opponents are radicals who hate America, quiz bowl reactionaries do not need to stoop to his level. Many of the anti-packet sub crowd actively c...

Carlos Be

Over 10% of Fall questions came from freelancing volunteers. Thank you to each of them: Matt Bollinger, Jordan Brownstein, Billy Busse, Ganon Evans, JinAh Kim, Will Nediger, Caroline Mao, Ryan Rosenberg, Catherine Qian, Adam Silverman, and Kai Smith. Seeing as so much of the set was written by non-...

Carlos Be

Will you be allowing college mirrors in the spring, or will they all have to be in the Fall or Winter?

Carlos Be

Based on some of the arguments in this thread , we have decided to format our packets by placing tossups between bonuses, rather than at the end. Moderators are expected to skip the paired bonus if a tossup goes dead; there is a note clearly stating this at the beginning of each packet. The question...

Carlos Be

Based on some of the arguments in this thread , we have decided to format our packets by placing tossups between bonuses, rather than at the end. Moderators are expected to skip the paired bonus if a tossup goes dead; there is a note clearly stating this at the beginning of each packet. The question...

Carlos Be

Another honest question, has anyone unaffiliated with Princeton agreed that there is substantial room for interpretation? I'm not trying to accuse you of impropriety, but it is often easy in these cases to get tunnel-vision while attempting to defend a friend and teammate. I am not affiliated with ...

Carlos Be

Io Saturnalia is now almost completely edited. The next week and a half will be spent making final revisions and proofreading. We have prepared a half-packet sample for prospective hosts. The questions in this sample will be used in the set, so do not share it with anyone who should not see unclear ...

Carlos Be

Saturnalia is now almost completely edited. The next week and a half will be spent making final revisions and proofreading. We have prepared a half-packet sample for prospective hosts. The questions in this sample will be used in the set, so do not share it with anyone who should not see unclear set...

Carlos Be

ANSWER: Nick Carraway [accept either underlined name] versus ANSWER: Nick Carraway [or Nick Carraway ] Another advantage of the second form is that it can be hard to tell the difference between Nick Carraway and Nick Carraway , particularly if you woke up early to staff a tournament or have been re...

Carlos Be

I don't think that losing five points on an interrupt matters very much one way or the other. Rather, I think negs cause anxiety because they're recorded. People often obsess over stats, so it can be demoralizing when the stats say "LOOK HOW MANY TIMES YOU FAILED." Similarly, if you neg a ...

Carlos Be

and subject edited by Ganon Evans, Nick Jensen, Vishwa Shanmugam, Bryanna Shao, Christopher Sims, Jaskaran Singh, Andrew Wang, and Chandler West. Is it ACF's policy not to specify which editor is in charge of which categories? I assume that some people know who's doing what anyway, either from talk...

Carlos Be

I will retain my terms for outreach purposes, since as you mentioned, quizbowl terminology is highly technical and very specific. New teams would have no idea what “regs+” is, but when they see “Difficult” or “Easy” or “Moderate”, they expect exactly that. "Regs+" is a silly term, but I t...

Carlos Be

I also vehemently disagree with not engaging with philosophical primary texts. It's especially strange to hear a comment like that from someone who is editing PSS for an upcoming tournament. I think it's pretty uncontroversial to say that reading primary texts will not help you get very many points...

Carlos Be

I don't see how mandating teams to provide a coach will have any impact on misconduct. There are countless cases of adults performing misconduct at college tournaments, just as there are countless cases of high schoolers performing misconduct under adult supervision. Furthermore, mandating that scho...

Carlos Be

it is in general a good idea to have at least one trusted adult (and "adult" can mean a college player here) on the staff I think the key word here is "trusted," not "adult." There's no reason that a trustworthy high schooler can't perform the role you are describing.

Carlos Be

So to sum up - yeah this needs to be addressed, and not side-stepped with questions over whether this is actually occurring. The reason I asked "How frequently does misconduct occur" was because I think it occurs a lot more than people think. It's not sidestepping the issue to discuss its...

Carlos Be

Not related to this specific incident Can we actually discuss this issue as a community? I think a general discussion about misconduct warrants its own dedicated thread or threads. This is a sensitive and important topic, so a discussion about it should have more structure than a typical forums dis...

Carlos Be

For a quick, incomplete answer, this online encyclopedia is a pretty good resource for ancient stuff.

Carlos Be

Justice William Brennan wrote: ↑Wed Jul 01, 2020 12:45 pm
Zealots of Stockholm wrote: ↑Tue Jun 30, 2020 8:52 pm Does this mean that all of the mirrors are delayed as well, or just the main site?
All of the mirrors as well, though no mirrors actually exist as of yet because of the COVID uncertainty.

Would you be willing to allow regional online mirrors in the fall if there is interest?

Carlos Be

Saturnalia is now 90% written and 55% edited. The original post has been updated to reflect the following announcements: We will be offering a $5 per team discount (so that the mirror fee is $15 per team) for hosts which record individual question stats. For tossups, this means counting the number o...

Carlos Be

Io Saturnalia is now 90% written and 55% edited. The original post has been updated to reflect the following announcements: We will be offering a $5 per team discount (so that the mirror fee is $20 per team) for hosts which record individual question stats. For tossups, this means counting the numbe...

Carlos Be

To clarify, I don't think tossup/bonus cycles should be intentionally of the same category (that does indeed help extreme specialism too much, as Alistair has said), but I don't think they should be intentionally different categories either. It's very discouraging if you're a team that's relatively...

Carlos Be

Justine, I hate to sound dismissive since I greatly respect you as a writer and player, but I think one reason people take issue with your posting style is that far too often, it comes across as nitpicky and critical of flaws that have already been recognized by the people who are actually implemen...

Carlos Be

[*] Please remember that a webcam is required to play this tournament. If you do not currently own a webcam, please work on getting one. [/list] I'm assuming that this is intended to prevent cheating, but how would it do that? If someone is googling, the webcam won't pick that up. The webcam will p...

Carlos Be

Smuttynose Island wrote: ↑Sun May 17, 2020 9:43 pm [*] Please remember that a webcam is required to play this tournament. If you do not currently own a webcam, please work on getting one.
[/list]

I'm assuming that this is intended to prevent cheating, but how would it do that? If someone is googling, the webcam won't pick that up.

Carlos Be

Adding to Eric's points, paired bonuses would make tracking conversion data a lot easier. Currently, moderators often skip bonuses (either by mistake or misunderstanding), making it difficult to tell what bonus was read in a given tossup/bonus cycle, therefore making it difficult to read bonus conve...

Carlos Be

7:00 am pacific is very early. Assuming that most people wake up between 8 and 10 am, you're asking west coast people to wake up over an hour before their usual wakeup time. On the other hand, if the tournament starts at 8 am pacific, then even if it lasts 10 hours it will still end at 9 pm eastern,...

Carlos Be

ramblinwreck wrote: ↑Wed Apr 22, 2020 1:01 pm invite you to play IKEA

Will the questions be packetized already, or will hosts have to assemble them?

Carlos Be

I'm not sure I understand what you hope to achieve with this oddly antagonistic line of questioning. What sort of response to the question "what if the target difficulty of ACF Winter is not easy enough?" could possibly satisfy you? What do you even expect possible responses to be? The on...

Carlos Be

I am not at all associated with either of these sets, but I do want to say I completely trust William's ability to hit the advertised difficulty, which is "two dots" or EFT 2017 difficulty. I cannot speak to the rest of your concerns, but I think the concern that ACF Winter will not be ea...

Carlos Be

Previously, ACF only had one tournament to fill the "easier than Regs" difficulty window, which is a very large window. Fall had to serve the dual functions of trying to attract brand new players to the game and providing more seasoned ones with a regs-minus experience. By adding Winter, ...

Carlos Be

Because of the addition of ACF Winter, the target difficulty for this year's ACF Fall will be lower than in years past. We are intending for the set to be a hyper-accessible introduction to college quizbowl for people with little to no previous playing experience, comprable to the Early Autumn Coll...

Carlos Be

I'm not sure exactly what harsh measures would entail- certainly, a 12-month ban from all quiz bowl activities, a publicly-accessable post to a person google searching their name (to be taken down after 3 years) detailing the cheating, and a formal letter to whoever is in charge of academic integri...

Carlos Be

I guess my main point is that earth science and astronomy are more closely related to chem, physics, and bio than they are to math and CS, and we should rethink how we are grouping these subjects together to ensure that everything is being represented properly. I think grouping math alongside compu...

Carlos Be

whether or not Tejas cheated (5 powers on FO to 17 powers on TO????) Are you accusing Tejas of cheating? I hope this is a joke—Adam is clearly referring to the high threshold we have to have when looking in "power gaps" to avoid a huge number of false positives. There is nothing clear abo...

Carlos Be

Daedalus wrote: ↑Mon Apr 13, 2020 8:00 pm whether or not Tejas cheated (5 powers on FO to 17 powers on TO????)

Are you accusing Tejas of cheating?

Carlos Be

Elsewhere Ike has stated his interest in informing NAQT and ACF of the details of his investigation I would hope there be a formal recommendation on this from perhaps the tournament directors or ACF or...somebody I don't believe this will actually happen, but I would be strongly opposed if ACF make...

Carlos Be

I think the main problem is that 1/1 other science is not large enough to ask all of the categories that get put in it. Statistics has to compete for space with pure math, astronomy, computer science, and the Earth sciences. As a writer, I've found 1.5/1.5 sufficient for lower levels, but that has t...

Carlos Be

In addition to things mentioned above, cheating accusations should probably belong in one of the forums sections that you need an account to view.

Carlos Be

Contra my esteemed colleague Prof. Boyd, I think this is a reasonable middle ground when there's suspicion but no concrete proof... Saying "someone at TO online cheated" is really saying "someone on this list of people cheated." Rather than throwing suspicion on one person, you'...

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