The Quizbowl Resource Center

Cody

Unfair? Possibly, but much easier as a method for determining eligibility than having to be aware of what schools are zoned where. Respectfully, Rob, this is a simple Google search in all but the largest school districts. Nick Pruitt, for one, could figure this out in about 20 seconds, and I can in ...

Cody

So, keeping with my taxonomical example but tweaking it, if the question-writer wants the order, the first clue technically distinguishes the order from the class (e.g. It says the statement "All of these animals have X", which is true of every animal in the order but not of every animal in the ...

Cody

I am not yet convinced that “should have been prompted” should be eliminated. In the obvious case – as it originated this specific form of protest – “moderator error” is not currently protestable, so the rules would require a significant adjustment (and deviation from current practice) to allow prote ...

Cody

Though I’m not entirely sure why this post of mine has been singled out — for example, the distribution for ARGOS has 1/1 math and CS and 0.5/0.5 Earth science, astronomy, and engineering, which is a similar proportion unless there is significantly more math than CS. For what it's worth, I saw this ...

Cody

In general, I strongly endorse editors using their discretion to tinker with subdistributions, within reason, but care has to be taken to distinguish ACF Regionals* and Nationals (primarily) from other tournaments where more latitude is allowed. ACF Regionals and Nationals have been regularized to a ...

Cody

The basic eligibility requirement for any interscholastic competition is enrollment. You must be enrolled at the school you play for. This automatically eliminates "playing up" to high school for the majority of the United States, but there are plenty of public schools that are not strictly grades 9 ...

Cody

For what it’s worth, qams and qams² both include a sheet for packet template generation that works with any distribution (including non-20/20) and is flexible enough to meet all of these restrictions except for tossup/bonus being different categories. It’s a bit easier to use since it’s in spread ...

Cody

qblint will cease to work as of March 1, 2025. The lint function requires access to a "restricted scope" to download files from your Google Drive. This required qblint to undergo a CASA assessment to evaluate application risk and ensure that the application handled your data safely. This assessment ...

Cody

Personally I think 9 games minimum for Winter is reasonable. With 14 teams that's the difference between 10 rounds and 12, and I think requiring a 12 round schedule is excessive. With 22 teams it's the difference between 11 rounds and possibly 14 (!!). Particularly in a circuit where taking public ...

Cody

I believe 7/7/7 into 6/6/6/3 (which was the original plan in the logistics email) would only take 11 rounds. Bottom-bracket teams would only play 8 games, but honestly if I were in a bottom bracket team I wouldn't mind thet. Eight guaranteed games is less than nine. The minimum you proposed is nine ...

Cody

There is no 21-team format that removes rounds from the schedule you had unless you allow one loss to eliminate a team from championship contention. Packet submission has no effect because the byes are natural. What would a 9-game minimum actually do? Even where it shortens the tournament, it can't ...

Cody

Hey, I'm a bit confused on how to edit this spreadsheet if you want to use a different distribution, say, if I wanted 22/22 packets with extra Trash questions. I get that I can add a row in Answers, but how do you make the formulas and script work? as long as you insert the row about the ...

Cody

This is very cool. you should prefer balance by half A – balance by total questions / questions with identical category & subcategory ID B – balance by half C – balance by no criteria What exactly is the difference between options A, B, and C here? There are two levels of balancing, category and sub ...

Cody

How do you decide which protests to resolve? You'd have to come up with a rule, based on how much time we're talking about. Let's say: We're on question 9, and there are 3 minutes left on the clock. At 2:50, a team buzzes in, answers incorrectly, and protests. The other team answers correctly for ...

Cody

Conceptually, it's critical to understand that prelims exist only because we have very poor seeding information and need to sort teams so that a tournament (the playoffs) can be played to determine the order of finish. If we had really good seeding metrics, we would do this totally differently. And ...

Cody

Fundamentally (and I am referring to the top bracket in all my examples here), it doesn't make sense to penalize a team for losing to another very good team but not for losing to a worse team. Carryovers do not function to “penalize” or “reward” teams compared to their other losses because “very goo ...

Cody

Dantooine is Big! wrote: ↑Thu Feb 15, 2024 4:32 pm
Auks Ran Ova wrote: ↑Thu Feb 15, 2024 4:30 pm Have you really?
I feel this is a sufficiently serious suggestion and proposal [...]

is this also a bit??

Cody

I have published a Google Docs™ add-on that streamlines quality assurance for quizbowl packets by providing automated consistency checks and automating common tasks. It consists of several components: a style and grammar checker, pronunciation guide placement, character counter, and a function to k ...

Cody

This is a public release of a basic script for placing pronunciation guides from the Quizbowl Pronouncing Dictionary . It has been used for 3 or more tournaments. This (older) short video is representative of how the script works. Left-click inserts a pronunciation guide. Middle-click copies a ...

Cody

qams was redesigned last year in order to keep up with modern set production practices. I am now releasing it to the public as qams². qams² is designed for sets with more question states and writers than qams, and colors the answer sheet based on question state rather than writer/editor. If your s ...

Cody

I am writing a science speedcheck tournament, a spiritual successor to Andrew Hart’s and Maryland’s Impossible Speedcheck tournaments. The overarching principles of this tournament are to: (1) ask lots of questions that can’t be done, or done well, at longer length; (2) ask lots of questions about un ...

Cody

It’s been tried (0.40/0.33), and the headache was not worth it. Granted, it’s a new decade... I think the existence of multiple distinctive all-film sets (and two more coming up this year!) suggests that it's possible to find .5/.5 per packet or so of non-repeating, sufficiently academic material. W ...

Cody

With apologies to Capt. Picard, my main reaction reading this is: Make it so! There's no reason in principle why the next set you (the general you) put together can't make room for more film. In general, when it comes to distributional tinkering, I think it'd be cool to see more people Just Go For ...

Cody

a player instruction, such as “description acceptable”, is only necessary when departing from standard quizbowl rules – e.g. descriptions are not acceptable for things with proper names. if you accept a description, but do not tell players that you are going outside of the ruleset, then accepting th ...

Cody

using “description acceptable” for answerlines without proper names is a bad writing tick that should be abolished. top 3 pet peeve. a player instruction, such as “description acceptable”, is only necessary when departing from standard quizbowl rules – e.g. descriptions are not acceptable for things ...

Cody

the return of AHAN wrote: ↑Mon Feb 27, 2023 1:24 pm
Cody wrote: ↑Mon Feb 27, 2023 11:44 am
But you can't isolate two teams out of four and compare them because you are ordering all the teams in the bracket at once.
Says who? It's four teams. It's not an inscrutable number of permutations.

then do it

standings first, then we can discuss generalizing.

Cody

The purpose of an advantage final is to balance the benefit of a final that provides public display of the best teams and the crowning moment against the detriment of a team going X-0 all day, then losing a one-off final to a team that went (X-1)-1 who they had beaten earlier in the day. And if the ...

Cody

The purpose of an advantage final is to balance the benefit of a final that provides public display of the best teams and the crowning moment against the detriment of a team going X-0 all day, then losing a one-off final to a team that went (X-1)-1 who they had beaten earlier in the day. And if the ...

Cody

I see no problem with using "site". Certainly, UNESCO doesn't, so it's a natural fit. The clues are carefully worded to help players arrive at the correct answer, including the clue about Abu Simbel -- which is about the Aswan High Dam, and the answerline is expansive. I do not understand in what ...

Cody

Any reason you all are targeting 15 packets? That seems a recipe for like 90 percent of teams not hearing at least 4 of them except at practice or in a shootout. Why is the fact that most teams don't play them a relevant point? This is guaranteed to happen to 2 packets with an advantaged final, no ...

Cody

Any reason you all are targeting 15 packets? That seems a recipe for like 90 percent of teams not hearing at least 4 of them except at practice or in a shootout. Why is the fact that most teams don't play them a relevant point? This is guaranteed to happen to 2 packets with an advantaged final, no ...

Cody

With exception for John Lawrence’s post, this is some of the most atrocious COVID-posting yet displayed on this forum. Literally no one said a word about the other umpteen tournaments this spring (including ACF Regionals and NAQT SCT) where hosts did not have a vaccination policy and people were d ...

Cody

I have updated the OP with a new feature to generate packet templates that you can paste into a word processor.

Cody

I'm happy to see another tournament choose to write 12 packets rather than 14 or 15. I basically agree with what Mike said: writers already do too much work for usually little pay to be writing 2 or 3 extra packets that almost never get played in tournaments (I've never played more than 12 games in ...

Cody

Conversely, I think 14 packets is a big waste of time and effort. Maybe 5% of your teams are going to be playing packet 13 and 14. For regular season events, quizbowl should just adapt to fewer rounds and possibly slightly unfair finals formats. I'd rather play more tournaments than waste a bunch ...

Cody

The only field sizes that can guarantee 10 games in 10 rounds (reserving two packets for finals) are 4, 6, 8, 12, 16, 18, and 24 teams. 5 of 9 2021 Penn Bowl mirrors (including the main site) would not have been able to run with 12 packets. Collegiate sets require an absolute minimum of 13 packets ...

Cody

imo, it would be wise to prioritize such a list. important information risks getting lost in the deluge. what are the absolute essentials to start the tournament? writing utensils, spare paper scoresheets, flash drive* for (or with) electronic packets (internet is never guaranteed and outages happen ...

Cody

Is this her? https://twitter.com/caroljguthrie?s=21 No, but this is and she's listed as faculty and staff in the South College catalog . Not contact information is listed, but it shouldn't be hard to wrangle that info from South College or try a stock email format (e.g. first initial last name ...

Cody

The program for 1995 Nationals has some stuff. 1st place - Tennessee A 2nd place - Georgia Tech A 3rd place - Maryland A 4th place - NC State Whether we can assume the existence of B teams is questionable, but it's pretty likely. However, no info from the tournament is listed in the table for Win ...

Cody

My knowledge of biology and genetics isn't the best, but can I ask what the reasoning was behind having "this phenotype" as the indicator for the death tossup? A lot of people I talked to at our site were really confused by that question, since it seemed like a fairly obtuse way to ask for "death ...

Cody

I’m not sure where the idea that bonus play is not competitively relevant comes from – though as Andrew notes, it wouldn’t particularly matter if it were true – but there is a plethora of data to test this on because almost everyone hosts their statistics on the hsquizbowl.org Tournament Database. T ...

Cody

One thing I would be interested in seeing: what happens with the ACF data when you remove tossup points? How dramatically does the importance of bonuses in deciding games increase? It would be interesting to treat tossups as fights over scoring opportunities, and bonuses as the actual scoring--more ...

Cody

One thing I would be interested in seeing: what happens with the ACF data when you remove tossup points? How dramatically does the importance of bonuses in deciding games increase? It would be interesting to treat tossups as fights over scoring opportunities, and bonuses as the actual scoring--more ...

Cody

Finally, I take issue with the idea that bonus play is not competitively relevant to quizbowl. It's true that, within a certain band of competence, bonus conversion is much less likely to impact a game result than tossup conversion; we've seen time and again that teams with lower bonus conversions ...

Cody

My second complaint is in regards to how a prelim tiebreaker was broken at this tournament. After prelims, both Maryland B and Rutgers B finished 3-3 to tie for fourth in the Pearl bracket. Maryland B had significantly more points per game, 6 more powers, more 10s, and nearly a third fewer negs ...

Cody

Good news! UVA Event Planning has finally approved us for 9 classrooms in New Cabell Hall. This tournament will be happening in-person with a field cap of 18 teams. Edit: Our field cap will be 18 teams, not 16 teams. You can run 21 teams with 9 rooms; Sam Luongo hosted many tournaments using that ...

Cody

There is little reason not to use answerline referents either exclusively, or deep into the question, for almost all questions. Experimentation on this front dates back to at least Minnesota Open 2012 . Absent low character caps, this practice makes questions better because it removes ambiguity and ...

Cody

The 2021 ACF Nationals Experience Survey will close at the end of the day. We would love to hear from you via the survey, or directly via other channels, including email.

Cody

long time lurker, first time poster the perfect complement to mob-rule is travelmapping , the much more exclusive (and obsessive) club of people who track the highway segments they’ve driven i added 795.96 miles and 24 counties for 2021 acf nationals, including 5.8% of US30 (much of which was f ...

Cody

The team wrap-up email has been sent to attendees, and is cross-posted here: Dear 2021 ACF Nationals attendees, Thank you all for attending ACF Nationals. It was a true pleasure to serve as your Tournament Director, and I found it to be a very special tournament. I hope everyone had a great time and ...

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