The Quizbowl Resource Center

cvdwightw

The tournament would consist of up to (but hopefully) 15 teams from both states. Each state would then be divided into 3 5-team divisions, who would then play an opening round-robin tournament against other teams in its division (at the moment, the divisions would all be random unless a perfect geo...

cvdwightw

I could see up to 5/5 of a 12/12 set being conceivably used for Christianity/Biblical stuff if the intended audience is known to not know very much about other religions, but no more than that. For 10/10, about 4/4 is probably the max, since with the Islam and Judaism questions that's more than hal...

cvdwightw

I know NAQT uses a "use before" code for its current events questions to make sure they're not using "not-so-current-events" questions. Does NAQT use such a code on its pop culture? I suspect that a lot of the bad trash questions, e.g. Shawn Bradley, were either written by peopl...

cvdwightw

Rather, I'd just be happy if the trash was on accessible, well written topics. A lot of times I find NAQT's trash to be on dubious topics (way out of date TV show, movie, athlete, Internet meme) and not written well to boot. Using an ICT example, the Shawn Bradley tossup was a poor idea. I would be...

cvdwightw

If you replace 15% of the HSNCT distribution that's too hard to write at the regular level with trash (or any category that is not very academic), you're doing a disservice to all the teams at the bottom of the pile who qualify for HSNCT on the strength of their prowess in categories that will disa...

cvdwightw

(Note: I dug this up while doing a Google search for quizbowl scandal to see just how many public IRC logs regarding the 2010 NSC were available after reading Matt's post about pastie) From March 22, 2009 Christopher Asch, the librarian and adviser to the Quiz Club at Stuyvesant HS, took seven stude...

cvdwightw

Secondly, are teams really not going to come back to a tournament if NAQT adds more social science and fine arts while cutting down on trash? Well, I'm going to divide NAQT customers into five groups, based on their likely response to this: 1. "We like HSAPQ (or other ACF-like tournaments) and...

cvdwightw

EDIT: I am informed that hypothetical MSJ A at PACE was MSJ B which might have also been MSJ A at HSNCT, which means we might have been seeding a team that finished 17th at HSNCT 26th. Given that the seeders almost certainly had statistics to use besides a finish that only happened the prior week, ...

cvdwightw

Torrey Pines did it at this year's HFT mirror - in a first-bracket playoff match.

That said, grailing on the much-more-difficult NSC set is extremely impressive.

cvdwightw

On a related note, I remember that in high school we were always prompted for giving answers like "shelley" or "miller," each of which could refer to two or more sometimes contemporaneous authors. Is there a reason that we do not do this anymore? This still happens in any well-w...

cvdwightw

Registration for the 2010 NASAT is now closed at 16 teams. Further information about the tournament can be found in Eric Douglass's post found on this page . A full schedule has been sent to a team contact for every team except California. If you are on Team California and you are reading this pleas...

cvdwightw

Here is a proposal for a 209-team HSNCT. This proposal uses 19 preliminary brackets of 11 teams each. This requires 1045 total games and math tells me that we can get this done in 15 rounds with 70 rooms although I haven't written a schedule to see if that's actually possible (to be safe we may want...

cvdwightw

Fun fact: The "Trophy 26" went a total of 192-68 (73.8%) in their prelim games. I went and broke down their games by result of previous game: Win: 114-61 (65.1%) Loss: 52-7 (88.1%) Win, no bye in between: 58-35 (62.4%) Loss, no bye in between: 28-2 (93.3%!) (the 2 teams that lost 2 consecu...

cvdwightw

If you are a member of one of the non-bolded teams, we would really like to know whether or not your team is committed to coming. I have sent an e-mail out to the team contacts regarding registration materials we have yet to receive, but sometimes posting on this board garners faster responses than ...

cvdwightw

To clarify what I meant by that: for the vast majority of students, economics and psychology are generally senior-year electives (especially economics) Is this true? Economics (at least micro, I don't think we did macro) was a required senior-year course at my high school, and since there appears t...

cvdwightw

Do you believe your “style” of question-writing, in any way, would provide this school, or any other school, an advantage, due to familiarity with this “style”? The right answer to this question is yes for every vendor, because schools who primarily play on regurgitated garbage and spend practice t...

cvdwightw

This is, to the best of my knowledge, a graphical representation of the 2010 HSNCT bracket (file hsnct2010.pdf). In addition, a blank copy (hsnct.pdf) is included. If the same card system is used in next year's playoffs, you can fill it out as Sunday progresses to see who is likely to play who, som...

cvdwightw

lchen wrote:Have you received NY's registration form and check? I mailed it on Saturday. Are the five bolded teams the only ones to have registered so far?

We did get everything. The (now seven) bolded teams are the ones that have sent in the entrance fee.

cvdwightw

Despite organizational and staff-wrangling lapses on my part, the 2010 West Coast Invitational received largely positive reviews. The West Coast Invitational will once again occur in 2011 with significantly earlier and better planning. An official announcement will likely come out in September or so...

cvdwightw

I'm surprised no one's mentioned what I'm now terming my two cardinal rules of moderating:

1. Know the rules before you show up.

2. Treat both teams with the respect you'd expect from the moderator if you were playing the game.

cvdwightw

I was planning to start a thread on this with several wild scenarios You mean like the scenario where Nick Polk buzzes in with Vargas Llosa on a Getulio Vargas question, but the interval between "Vargas" and "Llosa" is so long that the moderator awards him the points (note: this...

cvdwightw

What about this scenario: "William Faulkner, Bernice Bobs Her Hair." In this instance, the respondent has still given the correct answer but has appended completely inaccurate information. Should he/she be punished? I'm actually still not sure because if someone buzzed in and said "I...

cvdwightw

Suppose the following (quickly-written and too short) question appears in a packet (if it offends your sense of quizbowl aesthetics, just imagine that there are lines about A Fable and "The Bear" at the beginning): One of this author's novels contains a character who refers to his mother a...

cvdwightw

My personal hypothesis (developed after years of observation and hours of reflection) is that a player reaches his or her peak in his fifth year of regular college-level quizbowl or first year of grad school, whichever comes first, plus or minus a year or so. He or she maintains this prime for as lo...

cvdwightw

Ondes Martenot wrote:I'm curious who thinks I'm the 11th best player in the country

Since I believe I've pierced Gautam's A-X alias system, my guess is that's Daniel Pareja.

cvdwightw

This is an interesting idea (unfortunately, it seems far too close to IESA middle school format for my taste) with a few problems. First, there are certain categories (arts, social science, and physics come chiefly to mind) that are just plain not converted by completely new teams or below-average n...

cvdwightw

I'm not by any means the world's greatest science writer/editor, but here are a few more tips on writing for science: Science Current Events I'm interested to see what people think about including "Science Current Events." By this I mean a lead-in discussing an article that appeared recent...

cvdwightw

Man, and to think that I could have totally moved up one spot in the poll by simply voting myself at #21 instead of not including myself on my ballot!

cvdwightw

I used opposing tossups converted because Team A can only have a chance on bonuses controlled by Team B. I did it since the tournaments I did it for wanted to use controlled BC as a tiebreaker stat. Right; the question is why you don't subtract out the bonus parts that Team B gets, as Matt does. Fi...

cvdwightw

Cheynem wrote:Also, HOW DID PEOPLE PIERCE MY ALIAS SYSTEM?!

You forgot to ROT-13.

cvdwightw

The 2010 Collaborative Middle School Tournament has been sent to the packet archives and will probably be posted soon and can now be found on quizbowlpackets.com. This thread allows for question-specific discussion; questions can be critiqued individually (e.g. this specific question that was way to...

cvdwightw

Cheynem wrote:13. cvdwightw
14. Ice Warrior

Assuming these people are who I think they are, this can't be right. Auroni's scored more than me at every tournament we both attended and except for SCT his teammates scored more than mine, so it's not like I'm being hurt more than he is by the shadow effect.

cvdwightw

I just wanted to post here that I did receive an official bid from Kentucky for an NASAT team and approved it so that the ball can get rolling on other things. This team is not set in stone until the official registration form comes in, if one from Kentucky comes in.

cvdwightw

This is a reminder that HSAPQ is still accepting bids for states that have not yet had an approved bid. Registering is a two-step process: 1. Anyone affiliated with quizbowl in the state (player, coach, parent, educator) can bid to send a team of four players and up to two alternates. HSAPQ will the...

cvdwightw

At this point we are no longer accepting additional bids to host the Collaborative Middle School Tournament. We will release the set for public consumption on Monday; at that time we will also start a feedback thread in this forum allowing for question-specific discussion.

cvdwightw

Update: we hit 700 questions a few minutes ago. We are planning to write a total of 924 questions, 44 of which will go in the sample packet and 880 of which will be used to make 20 packets of 23/21 for the tournament proper. This puts us at a little over 200 questions to write (I'm not giving an exa...

cvdwightw

I mean, I've taken something like three organic chemistry courses and I had never heard of Diels-Alder before quizbowl. mind status: definitely blown do they not have, like, pi electrons in canada Hey in my two o-chem classes we covered Sharpless dihydroxylation and not Diels-Alder or Friedel-Craft...

cvdwightw

I see that the discussion has simmered down from "this tournament was an abomination that made Dwight cry" I hope I didn't insinuate that this was in any way an "abomination." There were large parts of this tournament I enjoyed, and significant parts I did not. When you've lost ...

cvdwightw

This is the only tournament ever to have made me cry.

You read that right. This tournament made me cry.

I've sat here for half an hour trying to think up some way to expand this into a traditional Dwight Wynne-length post, but I think the above two lines sum up everything I could say.

cvdwightw

TEAM VIRGINIA Stephen Eltinge (Thomas Jefferson) Sarah Angelo (Maggie Walker) Greg Tito (Maggie Walker) Charlie Perkins (Honaker) This does not match up to what George told me he submitted...JR Roach and Tommy Casalaspi are missing. George submitted this bid and said he was still waiting for confir...

cvdwightw

The only counterexample I can think of is an answer with very few clues, where if you did not include all existing clues you would not have a tossup of sufficient length. But generally, this is great news for the hard questions on easy things movement. Is this news? Seemed like longwindedly stating...

cvdwightw

The following teams have been accepted to compete at HSAPQ's 2010 National All-Star Academic Tournament. Rosters are listed below the team name with each player's school listed in parentheses. Teams that have officially registered will be marked in bold font. This list will be updated as more bids a...

cvdwightw

Here's a stronger version of the argument: Suppose that a given answer has n possible clues and that you want to create a j -clue tossup. Each of those n clues is answerable by a certain number of players. You can create n C j potential tossups that satisfy condition 1 of the "satisfactory toss...

cvdwightw

Tomorrow, teams who submitted bids by March 18 will receive official notice on the status of their bid. A list of accepted bids, including team members, will be posted in this thread as well. Over the next week, teams whose bids are accepted will receive additional information about the tournament i...

cvdwightw

Sunday stats: http://results.scobo.net/SQBS.aspx?org= ... =standings

cvdwightw

Tournament wrap-up: On Saturday, we played 13 rounds of HSAPQ Tournament Set 10 (a double round robin with a 4-2 playoff split). Torrey Pines went undefeated at 13-0; Bellarmine took second at 10-3 with all 3 losses to Torrey Pines and La Jolla A took third at 7-6 with all 6 losses coming to TP and ...

cvdwightw

While writing a behemoth of a post over in that True National Format thread, I realized that much like Academic Decathlon "study materials," quizbowl has a set of "study materials" that it selects many of its questions from. It's called the canon, and the core of the canon is pre...

cvdwightw

It seems to me that the legitimacy of quizbowl as an activity is much more threatened by people who think that teams losing to other teams who are better than they are is "unfair" Yeah, to continue the sports analogies, quizbowl seems to be the only "sport"/activity where you ca...

cvdwightw

RB and Arcadia: I need to know by the end of today if you are bringing a(nother) team for either or both days.

cvdwightw

This came out of the Illinois Discussion Forum and I (and apparently Coach Riley) thought discussion of this might be better served here where people who don't read the Illinois forum can share their thoughts: is a (or rather, THE) national format desireable? Since we have different state formats, w...

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