Ignore the first three posts; I mainly wanted to get them out of the thread, and they're tangentially related to the topic at hand.
Charbroil wrote:Also, would it be possible to use this set for a high school tournament? It seems like it would be of an appropriate difficulty for such an event.
Sorry for not responding sooner. My initial thought is no. I'll discuss my reasons for this, and maybe some good counterarguments could change my mind.
1) There are already going to be several good IS sets and HSAPQ sets available for the time period.
2) The window for hosting will be somewhat short, and most regions cannot support a tournament during the timeframe that I'd like to host it. There might be a couple of regions where this isn't a concern.
3) I see no real benefit to allowing high schoolers to play this set, other than as simply another tournament for high schoolers to play (and possibly to line the pockets of the writers/editor). In other words, I see no shortage that Novice would help alleviate; I believe there are already enough tournaments to support running a quality high school event every weekend during the window for running Novice.
4) On the other hand, I see a couple of drawbacks. First, there will be ten rounds, which is not great for regular-length tournaments. Second, though the difficulty will be for "true collegiate novices," it won't necessarily be a typical high school tournament, and players seeing the "novice" name might be put off by the questions they end up playing.
5) Finally, there will likely be an invite-only discussion subforum for this tournament. I'm expecting that a lot of new players will be introduced to the forums and the larger quizbowl community through the discussion of this tournament. My experience with high school tournament discussions leads me to believe that having a high school contingent in the discussion would be detrimental to keeping these new hsqb users and potential community members. I think the fact that the tournament was also used for high schoolers could be disheartening to new players who were challenged by the questions. That is somewhat magnified by the way high schoolers tend to discuss questions. A bunch of new collegiate players thinking "who is this class of 2016 person, and why did they find this tournament so unbelievably easy that they posted about how every leadin was 'transparent' and 'stock'?" could really undermine the purpose of this tournament.
In sum, I don't see a huge positive reason to allow high school tournaments to run on this set, and I see a couple of drawbacks, one of which could limit the effectiveness of the tournament's primary goal. As I said, I'm fine with discussing this further if there are those who disagree.