The Quizbowl Resource Center

I stayed at the same Best Western when moving in to Harvard and will also give my endorsement for decent pricing. It's also located about half a mile away from the subway, which will get you to Harvard as well.

However, I would claim that the dichotomy between GE courses at a large, public university and non-GE courses is a somewhat valid criteria for judging what players who aren't science specialists are likely to know. Put simply, I can expect that any halfway competent UCLA player (at least, those tha...

Well, see, that's the important thing. If listening won't help you, neither will some theory class (for anything but the first part, which is indeed only accessible to people who actively study music, as leadins, I think, should be). Here's a good way to remember the insertion of that air, whatever...

At the science level, there's intro to biology, intro to physics, intro to (pick your favorite discipline of earth science), and intro to astronomy. While these require more effort for a non-scientist than a music appreciation course would require for a non-musician, they're still somewhat accessib...

Of course I'm not saying this is impossible. My point is that, a priori, there's no reason this should happen more often than the analogue for CS. I literally do not understand the point you are trying to get across. What does this mean? Matt claims that CS is a particularly hard field for non-spec...

I don't really care either way, since more CS would probably displace math, which I like more; but I don't think comparing CS to an obscure region of history or music is valid. In particular, I'd argue that the entire classical music distribution is quite difficult for non-specialists to get into, ...

In particular, I'd argue that the entire classical music distribution is quite difficult for non-specialists to get into, especially if you don't play any instrument or are tonedeaf. What, seriously? You can enjoy just listening to music—I know I do, and I don't play any instruments. Have fun readi...

I mean, yeah, I have to agree with Jerry's point here even more emphatically...CS has never been a category in quizbowl, and there's no reason to expect that to change given that "real" CS (anything without "sort" in its name or anything that does not reduce to general literacy ...

If so then I propose that "Questions that start with 'How' are bad" for the exact same reasons - complete lack of pyramidality, difficulty in deciding whether an answer is correct, etc. This is a bit irrelevant since I now agree that computational questions are probably outside the scope ...

We are still talking about high schoolers, right? Right. You have absolutely no way of comprehending how incredibly far above the above-average high school math student you were in high school. The high school math canon should not come to include any concepts so abstruse as to merely merit a passi...

This is because, in a pyramidal noncomp question as described, we don't care about the knowledge of solving a problem! We care about knowledge of the concept because that is what quizbowl tests - knowledge, NOT application. When you add the application aspect to the tossup, you make it a different ...

Why can't you just write a tossup on "the fundamental theorem of calculus" that uses "you would use it to solve such-and-such a problem" as a clue, if you really just want to reward knowing which formula applies? Do you understand that questions like that are written all the tim...

I mean, kind of? But not really: high schoolers are never going to be able to answer tossups on Alexander-Lefchetz duality, whatever that is, ever ever ever. Because they'll never know jack about it, because that sort of information is simply inaccessible to the immense majority of high school stud...

Regarding MathCounts questions: Middle school kids get 45 seconds to do these problems. They often take more than 10 seconds to do them, and I hate to say it but as kids get interested in other parts of quizbowl and other parts of math they're not focusing on improving that time. I dunno, maybe som...

"There are 3 red marbles and 3 blue marbles in a jar. They are drawn out one by one in succession, without replacement. What is the probability that, at any time, the number of red marbles drawn is at most equal to the number of blue marbles drawn." There are two ways to do this: (1) Reco...

Then you're not even pretending to ask pyramidal questions anymore, you're just doing buzzer-race on "remember the formula." Well that's only if my question is something stupid like "given a triangle with sides a, b, and c, what is its area?" I can make this better by asking for...

As Matt said, the number of problems that are computable in 10 seconds number below 50. This is just completely false. If you go look at the middle school MathCOUNTS countdown round, there are on the order of 100 questions each year, each of which is answered in much less than 10 seconds. And that'...

For all those who hate arithmetic -- what if all numbers in computational math problems were replaced by variables? This non-random gap after realizing how to do the problem is now narrowed, and you can actually answer with things like "the area is sqrt(s (s - a)(s-b)(s-c))," as in Andy's ...

Philosophy can be written without compromising the core tenets that make good quizbowl good quizbowl. Math computation, for the most part, cannot. Some things are academic and can be ranked in a competition but just don't fit the format of the game. We don't ask teams to write essays, debate each o...

There's still no good argument as to why we need to go through all these contortions to include (still entirely hypothetical) "good" math calculation at all. Sorry if this is going around in circles, but..there just isn't. It doesn't need to be there, it's not quizbowl, and collegiate qui...

We included no math computation in last fall's HFT II, and though we're currently "discussing" the subject, I can only imagine that we'll continue to restrict our quiz bowl tournament to having quiz bowl content. I'm writing a lot of the math for HFT III, which will probably not have comp...

yisun = Yi Sun from Harvard

Honestly, had this been an introductory college tournament, or had it even been a tournament explicitly designed specifically for the ten top high school teams tin the country, I would have been delighted to see both of those things come as tossup answers, but to use them as something besides the t...

However, I feel that numerical integration was not a good question because everyone obviously knew what it was but not how to call it. I did know what this was called in high school, but perhaps that's because I took a class called "Numerical Analysis". IMO, neither phonon/numerical integ...

There was 15/0 math, (<4)/4 comp sci, 15/15 physics total in the tournament. The math theory was written to have answers that everyone in the room would know of, which did make the questions a bit weird, but it's nearly impossible to give six lines of clues on any high school math topic. It's confus...

I was in charge of part of the bracketing for the tournament. We noticed that a number of high school tournaments had around 5 prelim rounds; the full round robin for the playoff bracket was to ensure that all the teams who traveled a long way to play in the tournament got the chance to face each ot...