The Quizbowl Resource Center

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Now that NAC is over and the set is presumably clear for discussion, would anyone care to brighten my day by posting some egregiously terrible questions. The kind that make you cringe when you hear them, like audio tossups on blenders or "name the four presidents not buried in the US" and...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Les Roby brought White Plains to the National Academic Championship for the first time in 1990, when they finished 2nd in the nation. They’ve participated every year since then, a perennial playoff presence with at least one of their teams. In 2011 they finished 3rd in the nation; in 2012, 4th. It’...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Well, the word on the street was correct, Detroit Jesuit won this: http://qunlimited.com/national.htm In a wonderful case of Chip being Chip, he has named Hastings small school champion with a 6-3 record and 308 ppg, though small school Irvington was 8-1 with 369 ppg. Also, for whatever reason the i...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Its rather pathetic that over 24 hours after the completion of this "national championship" tournament the only way to figure out the result is to look at Facebook for people who were there, and the tournament's actually website has yet to be updated...but oh well, just yet another flaw of...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

I've asked this question before, but why even include NAC in the "National Tournament" forum's description, if this is how people feel about it? It IS technically a tournament that draws teams from across the nation...(to a certain extent)...but if that was all that was required for the t...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

4. In Westchester County, while Sam and Ryan can attest to this perhaps better than I can, I think we played a role in helping get Ardsley and Irvington to tap into the wider quizbowl world. Ardsley then went to HSNCT this year and did very well - I'm wondering if they're the first Westchester team...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Susan wrote:
Maxwell's Sexual Relations wrote: On another note, as someone who has heard "Uncle Ernie" moderate at the 2010 JNAC...
Wait--does this guy willingly go by "Uncle Ernie"? Yikes.

yes, it is how he introduces himself.

Scaled Flowerpiercer

It should be noted for the sake of fairness regarding the protest that Irvington may have been slightly at fault because the initial protest after the game was slightly different from the second protest (though the "magnitude of wrongness" of the question shouldn't matter, the convex issue...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

So, as it has been confirmed that this question won't be replayed, the Irvington protest: Question: "If a polygon has 6 faces and 8 vertices, how many edges does it have?" (Answer: 12) The question was answered by a member of Watson Chapel before I could reach the buzzer, as the many thing...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

I definitely agree that it would be a good idea for NAQT/PACE/someone to follow up on NHBB's more "out of the way" areas for outreach - assuming that Father Duenas even knows of HSNCT's existence (and they very well may not), they evidently never had an opportunity to qualify for HSNCT, an...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

In any case, though, the much bigger advantages we have are the fact that we have a burgeoning middle school program backed by the History Channel, the fact that we can go in to any school and immediately have a target audience with the history teachers (even overseas), and that we will have four h...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

I'm confused, Sam. I remember meeting you in person at Prison Bowl, where you individually and your team generally seemed to notice and enjoy the good aspects of the tournament and of modern quizbowl. You also seem to have spent many words over the past few weeks publicly defending NAC, and attempt...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

The HSNCT also has a lot more teams in one location, thus finishing in the top 10-15% at HSNCT does not make one a trophy whore. Also, a more apt "comparison" would be the past two NSCs, which gave team trophies to the top 16 out of 64 and 60, respectively. Just to clarify, I never meant ...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

So, the DC section of this is over. High Tech got 1st and will be going to Chicago, having beaten Watson Chapel in the final the other final four teams were Ardsley (who lost to High Tech) and Irvington (who lost to Watson Chapel). Overall comments on the tournament: on the whole, the tournament was...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

The write-up of the New Orleans Phase has been published:http://qunlimited.com/national.htm
The only questions Chip mentions are a couple bonus topics: Steve Jobs, Pulitzer Prizes, and the wonderful 60-second category of "things" was swept.

Scaled Flowerpiercer

jamarcus.donow

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Just to add to the suggestions for Ms. Bown in Massachusetts - I don't know exactly where you are in Massachusetts, but if you are close enough and your team is willing to travel far distances on Saturday mornings, there are an abundance of tournaments in the NY/NJ area that you could always come to...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

there is little about NAC that can be seen to be wrong many of the complaints people have about NAC are not things most teams will complain about as for "Chip being Chip," again, if you don't know what the alternative is, you don't really know what this means. when viewed in a vacuum, the...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

No one's trying to dispute the validity other people's subjective experiences of "fun" or of whether NAC succeeds at being NAC, whatever that may be defined as. I don't see anyone doing so in this thread or, pretty much, ever. I don't understand who you are countermanding here. I know no ...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

I think that experiences like what North Babylon had are something that is forgotten about NAC, as on this forum often the idea people get is very very negative. Drawing from last year's NAC thread: I was here too. It was an awful, gut-wrenching experience. Other highlights include wonderful hoses, ...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

According to Qunlimited's website, these are the winners of NAC-New Orleans: ( http://qunlimited.com/HighSchoolVarsity.pdf , http://qunlimited.com/JuniorNationals.pdf , http://qunlimited.com/HighSchoolJV.pdf ) Varsity: Harrison, Runner Up: White Plains A JV: Altamont A, Runner Up: Clements A Junior ...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

There is a team called Paschal which is also 4-0 and got the highest one round score of 500 points (Harrison managed 480). They have to face Harrison today. Business as usual. A little bit of investigation shows that Paschal went to HSNCT last year and went 5-5, though does not seem to have played ...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

If anyone wants to keep tabs on this, statistics are actually being put online at the end of each day apparently, so New Orleans day-1 prelim results are available, though they are hard to gain any information from quickly: http://qunlimited.com/nosche11.htm ...as far as the teams that I bothered to...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

A top NAC team, given a year of playing pyramidal and with some motivation to adjust to the format, could do really well. I think the reverse would also be true, but I don't want to test that because that's just cruel. I'd love to see how last year's NAC champs would have fared at HSNCT just as muc...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

What you've shown is that there is a positive though not sensational correlation between "Doing well at NAC on Saturday" and "Doing well at NAC on Sunday", where teams that are eliminated at the same time in a single-elimination tournament are almost surely ranked in the same or...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Trophy Whores Who Know Very Well What They're Doing (morality failure) So basically you have fewer teams and the possibility that anyone can win. There are a lot more teams actually competing for the trophy. This has NOT been the case with Junior NAC. Longfellow has run over the field for the past ...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

As someone who was played many QUnlimited packets, I can say pretty definitely that, not counting the nearly-unanswerable obscurata , NAC questions are vastly easier than NSC questions, no matter how much easier it is than HSNCT, except for a select few, I imagine most of NAC's field would get <100...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Good point about difficilty. Given that NSC has been the statistically easiest national tournament for 10 years running, it's likely that some bad teams avoid it since their chances of pulling out an undeserved win through lucking out on what material happens to be answerable in a given round are s...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

I think one of the issues with the multi-site model is that teams not in the title hunt don't get the "nationals experience" of playing the best teams, watching the title games, etc. Obviously it's impossible to play the best teams at NAC in the first place, but it's sort of weird to have...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

I was inspired by the Graph on the qbwiki page for NAC, this is a graph going up to this year showing the relative attendance of NAC, HSNCT, NSC, Junior NAC, and MSNCT

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/34972177/Natioa ... ndance.png

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Down and out in Quintana Roo wrote:The attendance of High Tech is probably the most distressing here. They are a great quizbowl team but this is a huge mistake, and a waste of their time and money to go to this.

EDIT: Angela said everything I was going to say

Scaled Flowerpiercer

- Don't know any better (outreach failure) - Misconceptions about Good Questions or Good Nationals (information failure) - Fossilized Admin/Coach (institutional failure) - Trophy Whores Who Know Very Well What They're Doing (morality failure) For Irvington, part of the issue is "Fossilized Adm...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

So, this is happening again this year. This is Chip's national tournament, the National Academic Championship, which will take place in three locations this year, as in past years. Taking some notes from last year's thread on this a lot of people thought that this didn't really belong in the "N...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Other people were trying to make statistical arguments, so... For MSNCT, Standard Deviation of PPB was about 3.6856 , with a mean of 16.77 For HSNCT, Standard Deviation of PPB was about 3.9555 , with a mean of 12.546 So, the z-score (For anyone stat illiterate, this is the number of standard deviati...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Numberphile (http://tinyurl.com/7wkayo2): These are pretty cool videos about mathematics. They aren't very technical, but are highly amusing. I really like the one about Graham's Number. I approve of this source of learning things, though I will admit that the knowledge has yet to help me in Quizbo...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

I do think that the main argument which can be made against the 4-quarter format is the difficulty of writing for it: though notably I think HSAPQ improved a lot in areas like the one part bonuses / 60-second rounds from NHBB 2011 and NHBB 2012, so moving forward, that should be increasingly less of...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

The Nathaniel Hawthorne Bonus was pretty easy because it listed Young Goodman Brown ... though I think it is entirely appropriate to put that work in the bonus part if the answer line is going to be Hawthorne, I thought it was significantly easier than many of the other follow up bonus questions tha...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

1. More technical set-up. Under the current set-up, teams really deserve to have visible access to a clock, which is for the rest of the game just another piece of electronics that someone needs to bring and can get lost. And in many cases moderators had clocks which they neglected to made visible ...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

I must say, other than the difficulty that went all over the place, I actually did like the 60 second rounds. If you could just control the difficulty more, and maybe remove the time limit, this is something that can be enjoyable. I do think that the time limit removal is a good idea - many of the ...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

I will head a group that writes 400 tossups for Scobol Solo, which will be 14 regular rounds of 20 questions each and 1 difficult round of 60 questions (plus assorted extra questions). If anybody wants to contribute tossups in exchange for free mirroring, or if anybody wants to write enough bonuses...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Irvington will (hopefully) send a freshmen team, a registration form will be sent when we know whether or not we will.

Scaled Flowerpiercer

ProfessorIanDuncan wrote:
And some people from my team would probably be interested.
Get them interested. They don't listen to me

you are interested, that is 1/4 of a team already. And complaining here does not help make our non-forum using team interested.

Scaled Flowerpiercer

I Min Alsklings Tradgard wrote:I could probably read for some of these depending on when I'm in NY.

Same. And some people from my team would probably be interested.

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Administratively, I think that all the points made about specializing jobs, etc seem like they are on the right track - issues in general seemed to stem from just a general lack of knowing what to do. As I think was the same for many people, the morning rounds went off nearly without a hitch - we ha...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Also, why is NAC even acknowledged under the titling of the national tournaments sub-forum? It is still a national tournament in the sense of bringing teams from across the nation, whether or not a general community considers it to be a determination of a national champion. Also, for those who will...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Just in case you care about details of the situation of small teams that don't really matter that might impact their rankings... Irvington A, at the NY NAQT NYC-Metro Area State Championship on April 14 was missing one of its best players in the morning rounds, so our afternoon rounds might be a mor...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Also, if you just want to know the differences between the formats, here is... an NAQT packet: http://naqt.com/samples/t1973packet_01.pdf an HSAPQ packet (which is mACF): http://www.hsapq.com/questions/16/15.pdf a pace-nsc packet: http://www.quizbowlpackets.com/archive/2011PACE/Packet%2010%20-%20Pla...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

BroNi wrote:Some more stat corrections....In Kellenberg's second game v. Bronx Sci. A, the "20" for TUH was not entered which will throw off some stats.

This same thing appears to have happened in Ardsley C vs. Bronx Sci A

Scaled Flowerpiercer

On the plus side, a tournament that has awarded a neg prize will post stats promptly because they will have entered the stats in order to determine who netted most. Maybe we should encourage Princeton to give one. This is definitely true and a potential of such prizes ... though a tournament which ...

Scaled Flowerpiercer

Also, if it is easy to do, it would be nice to have separated prelims/playoffs/combined stats, but I have no experience in these matters so I wouldn't know how to help you. I will share Ryan's sentiments though - it was a very smoothly run tournament given that it was Scarsdale's first time, the onl...

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