The Quizbowl Resource Center

I've been hearing a lot about pyramidal vs. non-pyramidal questions lately, and most people just say "they don't use pyramidal questions, how could they not use pyramidal questions, blah, blah, blah," but it's helpful to know you understand why they're better instead of being an alarm-sys...

I've used Shmoop.com a few times for picking up literature knowledge, although I think it's a bit limited in scope (certainly not in depth, though--its summaries are very nice). You can find most public-domain literature online at Project Gutenberg, just in case you want to actually read books, and ...

If those pages are to be believed, then the entire Cave Spring A team at VCU Spring--James Cole, Ethan Mackey, Ethan Hoeffner, and Elyssa McMaster--played at both Bonfire of the Manatees and VCU Spring.

As I recall, the buzz occurred and was quickly stated to be an accident, the moderator cleared, several people on our side of the room looked quizzically at him and/or threw their hands in the air, and the moderator (who didn't appear to be very familiar with this particular rule) ruled the buzz to ...

EDIT: Never mind, I'm silly.

The overuse of quizbowlese might turn off new teams; then again, the use of certain turns of phrase isn't unique to pyramidal questions, and I'm not sure if teams unfamiliar with the culture would be able to articulate the specific notion of "quizbowlese." Fake knowledge triumphs in pyrami...

Was it just me, or was there an extraordinary number of answerlines on colors? (Blue, red x2, white x2 if you count "white people," Black Sea, perhaps others.) There were answerlines that came up in multiple categories but with different information. (I think I heard Egypt and maybe China,...

...before we continue, could we take a moment to define "regular difficulty" and/or identify where specific question sets stand on the big scale?

Saying that since there are more than six answerlines in a subcategory THEREFORE we can make it 1/1 is a nonsequitur. A tournament needs roughly 15 tossups and 15 bonuses to make up a 1/1 subdistribution, which involves 60 separate answerlines. This is all not to mention that categories should have...

I don't think reducing the amount of World Lit or social science in the distribution of a regular high school set to less than 1/1 is "neutering" quizbowl. People keep bringing up intellectual curiosity [or intellectual curiosity's inbred cousin, "spending an hour skimming science ar...

Information learned outside the classroom is fair game, as long as there's a decent chance that people will know it from a source besides random packets on Protobowl. This. With things like, say, world lit, I'd assume there's at least one person out there who actually likes reading books. You get a...

If one uses Quinterest's "study" tool to look up Social Science, it returns the message "Sorry, there are no matching results study." [sic], even though searching typical social science answerlines (e.g. Margaret Mead) brought back plenty of questions, all of which were labelled ...

World literature, as a subject, is not a monolith. There are answerlines that would be impossible for decently experienced teams, let alone novices, but there are also works and authors that should be appropriate for most teams. It's true that most high school literature classes focus on American an...