The Quizbowl Resource Center

cvdwightw

Do you have an ABSOLUTE deadline for registration, so that we know the time constraints under which we will be working? Registration will remain open until the week of the event, since we have ample capacity to accommodate several more teams. Please keep HSAPQ updated on your plans if you're trying...

cvdwightw

Traditional date areas (with suggested dates in parentheses): Fall UCLA's TWAIN is usually in early October. (October 1?) Triton Fall is usually in mid-November (November 12 claim) Caltech's fall HS tournament is usually in mid-November (November 19?). UCI's CBCT is usually in late October/early Nov...

cvdwightw

Is this the first national tournament ever, at any level, to have a median bonus conversion above 15 (I compute 17.25)? That's really impressive on the part of both NAQT and all the participating teams.

[countdown to CHRZ post about how this proves HSNCT questions should be easier...]

cvdwightw

Voted 1 and 4. To me, "regular difficulty" implies a whole host of other things than difficulty: it implies, chiefly, that it is a tournament that a standard college club ought to send a team to (as opposed to a "novice" tournament, which clubs struggling for recruits may opt not...

cvdwightw

I'm not speaking confidently, but I get the impression high schoolers playing college tournaments first happened maybe 5 years ago and didn't become relatively common until the last 3 years (anyone please correct me if I'm wrong). I think State College 1998(?) played one or two college tournaments....

cvdwightw

Your first priority as a tournament director is to find a date on which you will have enough staff to run the tournament and enough space available to accommodate the teams (in terms of rooms, parking, etc.). Your second priority as a tournament director is to figure out which of those dates that wo...

cvdwightw

Consider the PP20H of the 10-highest scorer and 20th-highest scorer at HSNCT from 2001 (first year PP20H is available) to 2010: 2001: 52.43; 36.76 2002: 49.17; 37.50 2003: 51.53; 38.91 2004: 45.61; 38.46 2005: 53.91; 45.18 2006: 54.19; 45.66 2007: 59.49; 50.22 2008: 60.96; 50.42 2009: 72.61; 56.30 2...

cvdwightw

I don't have a huge stake in this discussion, because regardless of what community consensus the West Coast is still going to have 4-10 team fields at every tournament that even exists next year. EACN EFT ACF Fall UVA/Michigan tournament Delta Burke Yale tournament Terrapin Penn Bowl SCT ACF Regiona...

cvdwightw

ICT DII is, if I'm not mistaken, just one step up on the NAQT question difficulty ranking scale from HSNCT (I think HSNCT is a "6" and ICT DII is a "7"). I think it's generally a fine measure to use, particularly for predicting performance at HSNCT. Not to mention that some NAQT...

cvdwightw

So it's been over a week and the packets still aren't up. One of the reasons for setting the April 23 cutoff date was to allow the set to be used as high-quality practice material for teams attending MSNCT. To that end, any middle school coaches who want a copy of the set before it gets uploaded sho...

cvdwightw

Hey high schoolers (aka Kay Li) who are losing this thread more and more with every post: go read this post . Then go read this post . Then go read this thread . Then realize that not only has this whole discussion about difficulty been rehashed and resolved many times at the college level ("ke...

cvdwightw

While on a perhaps ill-advised quest to see just exactly what caused the mess in the North Georgia MUT mirror thread, I came across this early salvo: [ the examination that Mike, Brian and I did of statistical tiebreakers ] was flawed in many ways, from both a statistics and quizbowl theory perspect...

cvdwightw

I really think the best thing to do would be to write something for people in the physical sciences in general. That would guarantee a much broader interest base for your event. Do this. Because engineering is such an unexplored field, 70-90% of your answers will be inaccessible to non-engineers no...

cvdwightw

Is there an "official" entry form? I sent the info earlier but we're not listed. I'm not sure what happened here. My guess is that your message got sent straight to my spam folder. This did get sorted out and the Illinois roster will be in the next update. If you don't get a confirmation ...

cvdwightw

Remaining by-bracket stats for D1 ICT: Second bracket: 23.9 TU per game, 85.5% converted (13.9% power) Third bracket: 22.6 TU per game, 80.1% converted (10.9% power) Fourth bracket: 22.1 TU per game, 69.4% converted (5.3% power) Overall within-bracket games: 22.9 TU per game, 81.9% converted (13.8% ...

cvdwightw

I checked this out and thought it to be very well-done. Two ideas for improvement: 1. A category of "miscellaneous academic" should be added for things that don't easily fit into one of the other areas. The classifier would have to judge this based on something like "doesn't match any...

cvdwightw

I didn't play ACF Nationals and I haven't seen the set. But I did want to interject about something for a minute. I think that continually repeating the whole "things have names and if you don't know the names, you don't get points" philosophy is sort of silly. Yes, lots of things have nam...

cvdwightw

The Bainbridge mirror was postponed past our intended final date, but as I understand did some sort of packet-swap with the Maclay tournament in Tennessee yesterday. Therefore, all currently scheduled tournaments on the CMST set have taken place. We are no longer accepting bids, and packets have bee...

cvdwightw

To turn away from rather crazy (perhaps sarcastic?) allegations of bias: Is there any way to try to "correct" for the SOS of teams playing the same set at different sites around the country? Could something like generating an NAQT D-value for each set, then perhaps averaging out a team's ...

cvdwightw

I'm going to make the possibly-radical suggestion, and I guess this is as good a place to do it, that NAQT strongly consider using ten-minute halves at all levels of competition. Yes, the middle school questions are shorter, but middle schoolers also have a tendency to do things that slow down the g...

cvdwightw

To make sure I understand: many people have deep enough "White Collar" (the show) knowledge that they buzzed on the first sentence? If so, that's entirely on me; I wasn't sure how deep to go on clues about White Collar (the show) for my lead-in, and I presumably would have made the same m...

cvdwightw

I was pretty surprised that It is So! (If You Think So) was not listed as an explicit alternate answer for Right You Are (If You Think You Are) . Also, the Australopithecus question turned into a giant game of buzzer chicken; I think everyone in our room sussed out that it was an early human ancest...

cvdwightw

What do people think of the difficulty level of this year's ICT? I was aiming for somewhat easier bonuses than in previous editions; I don't know if I succeeded, or overshot, or what. Personally I'd like to see the top teams getting more than 18 PPB but I think that may be harder to achieve with th...

cvdwightw

I was pretty surprised that It is So! (If You Think So) was not listed as an explicit alternate answer for Right You Are (If You Think You Are) . Also, the Australopithecus question turned into a giant game of buzzer chicken; I think everyone in our room sussed out that it was an early human ancesto...

cvdwightw

I was looking through the stats to see the details of this for myself, and noticed that the Div I Oxford-Virginia and Harvard-Wash U games in round 3 both had 31 TUH. In Div II, there were two games with 27 TUH: NIU-Michigan in round 3 and Valencia-Snead in round 10. Both of the 27 TUH games were c...

cvdwightw

I missed a few things here, and figured I'd reply in a new post rather than tacking more onto the last behemoth. In general smaller sample sizes should be avoided to minimize sensitivity to incorrect initial seeding and avoid tiebreaker necessities. With a larger initial group size, we can eliminate...

cvdwightw

I don't know what the hell you want me to do . I cannot speak for anyone else but I would like you to come up with a better format that is fair to all teams and does not rely upon PACE's ability to seed teams before the tournament. I think the key issue here is that you need to get beyond the idea ...

cvdwightw

EDIT: Are prelims supposed to be 2/3/3? That seems like it would actually work. I think I meant splitting 2/2/2/2, giving 3 brackets of 6 in each playoff tier (and thus making the "play the other four teams in your superplayoff bracket you haven't already played" part make sense). So here...

cvdwightw

This isn't my position on this format, but I have heard it from some others: this feels like an abnormally low number of prelim games to decide if teams are ultimately in contention or not -- what is Dwight's take on this matter? We could have gone with the following format: 9x8 prelims, split 3/3/...

cvdwightw

I can't shake off the feeling that certain moderators and administrators were chosen because they're friends of previous mods and administrators. Seriously though, if Auroni or others have concerns about this, I hope you'll air them; I'm pretty confident this issue, at least, will be easy to addres...

cvdwightw

Was any thought given to a system where the lower brackets finish up a little quicker, enable all the players to watch the top bracket's final rounds, as happened last year, or would that have required to significant a change in schedule? Speaking only for myself as the primary designer of this sys...

cvdwightw

1. Does there need to be an explicit rule about bringing intra-team baggage onto the forums, or is this sufficiently covered implicitly by the other rules? 2. In the staff's (or just your) opinion, has the shutdown of AHAN Jr. produced a net positive effect on the (other sections of the) boards, spe...

cvdwightw

What are people's thoughts about computing bouncebacks as the number of bounceback points earned divided by the number of individual bonus parts that a team had the opportunity to bounceback? This was the method suggested by the SQBS guide I have. This is almost exact to mine, except that the stat ...

cvdwightw

I'm confident that would not have happened had we been playing Kansas State Fun Bowl. You're missing the point here. "Kansas State Fun Bowl" is the same exact tournament as Illinois Open, with a different attribution. Matt's contention is that there would be zero defenders of this tournam...

cvdwightw

I've started adding statistics for tournaments that have them in the space next to the host name in the thread's second post, so people can see the statistics all in one place. We're still taking bids, but because we want to release the set as practice material for MSNCT, cannot accept bids for date...

cvdwightw

In my opinion, it's not just finally figuring out answer selection that makes a tossup easier to write. It's also having an overall theme to the tossup. If you're searching all over the place for clues about, say, George Washington, it may take you a really long time to comb through your sources and...

cvdwightw

Since no one else has mentioned the 2002 RM team that took the train to GW on a lark for NSC and promptly charged right through the tournament after playing nothing but It's Academic stuff the whole year, I will put them forward as a contender for this list. They're arguably the most surprising maj...

cvdwightw

This tournament happened. I'm assuming UCSD won/is winning/will win, although I only have partial stats. Stats will probably be up tonight. Scores are, as one would expect, low.

NOTE TO FUTURE SELF: don't assume teams that have buzzer systems will actually bring them.

EDIT: Stats

cvdwightw

I feel like that calendar is nicely flexible in the sense that I don't see all of those events/writing crews remaining constant, even as early as next year. Because of this, one thing I'd like to see is inviting teams that might conceivably try to write all or part of high-quality tournaments in th...

cvdwightw

Alejandro, if you guys have a place I could crash on Friday night, I could conceivably rent a car and drive up to Claremont on Friday night. I could then take you guys back on Saturday night. The Internet tells me that it takes about 45 minutes to drive between John Wayne Airport and Claremont--is ...

cvdwightw

I think Alejandro said that Claremont might be coming, but that could be old information. We're having trouble finding transportation again, although there's still hope. If we can't get a car, though, is there any feasible way to get to Irvine through public transportation? The short answer is no. ...

cvdwightw

Don't expect anything that makes complete sense out of me in the next day or so, as between spending a week in Baltimore and coming down with some sort of nasty virus there I've been pretty much out of the whole loop. I think this is sort of what the field looks like? Please correct me if you've pos...

cvdwightw

Can someone help us with a place to stay for WCI? The finances aren't looking fantastic right now. UCLA ran into...um...problems getting rooms. We'll need to move to a backup option, which I'll figure out...um...after other things get off my plate. Stay tuned. Sorry this thing has turned into just ...

cvdwightw

I will play this, assuming that I am in Chicago at the time and that my ICT teammates do not have other things planned. I am looking for teammates who are as much interested in the creation of wacky theme packets as they are in playing this tournament. I assure you I have already concocted a suffici...

cvdwightw

Just to preserve for future comparison (to be updated once all slots in the field are filled):

Initial cut-off (D1): 257.565 (7 wild card bids awarded)
Initial cut-off (D2): 300.265 (12 wild card bids awarded)
Final cut-off (D1):
Final cut-off (D2):

cvdwightw

As of 9:15 Pacific Time this set has been fully edited, proofread, packetized, compiled, and sent to hosts using the set in February (unless the zip file doesn't work...). We will be revising the set in response to any feedback received from hosts, but believe this set to be of higher quality when c...

cvdwightw

As of 5:00 PM Pacific Time on February 11, this set has been fully edited and packetized, and will be proofread over the weekend. We will therefore have a finished set ready to send to our first set of hosts no later than February 15, our stated deadline. I want to thank all of my co-writers and edi...

cvdwightw

In fact, I think Irvine had a couple of physics grad students that I have never before seen play quizbowl, and they were certainly contributing points to their team. All four members of the Irvine team have played in at least one college tournament since 2006. I honestly think the assumption that &...

cvdwightw

The Ray Noble song of this name supposedly inspired Charlie Parker's creation of bebop. That's what it was. I misheard "Ray Noble" and then figured that since the question didn't mention "Koko" (which is, by any account that I can find, the song that was actually based on "...

cvdwightw

I'm actually ok with DI SCT being slightly above the difficulty of ACF Regionals (since there are a bunch of, comparatively less experienced, players who play Regionals and DII SCT). (Analogously, I'd hope DII SCT would be a shade easier than ACF Fall, since there are no Sorices playing it.) I'm a ...

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