The Quizbowl Resource Center

Fort Osage High School in Independence, Missouri is offering its first ever Novice set to mirror for the 2015-16 season (FONS I). The set is regular difficulty but is aimed at Novice players (Freshmen and Sophomores), and will largely stick to that canon. It will be available from January-June 2016. It will consist of 11 packets of 20/20 (tossups/bonuses) with 2 tossups/bonuses at the end as tiebreakers (each packet will consist of 22 total tossups/bonuses). This set is not intended as competition for the excellent SCOP set from Illinois, but merely as an alternate choice for schools looking for the chance to host another Novice tournament (that is aimed at new high school players). The set is powermarked and will consist of tossups of 5-7 lines (most will be 6 lines). The distribution is as follows:

DISTRIBUTION:

4/4 Science (includes the poss. of 1/1 non-comp Math)
4/4 Literature
4/4 History/Soc. Studies
3/3 Fine Arts
3/3 Geography
2/2 Religion/Mythology
1/1 Current Events
1/1 Trash

COST:
The cost is $10 per team with a $1 discount per team for any host who provides detailed SQBS statistics.

PROSPECTIVE MIRRORS:
Olentangy Liberty HS: (in-house) 2/26/16
Brookwood HS (GA): 2/27/16
Fort Osage HS (host) 4/9/16

Please e-mail me ([email protected]) if you are interested or if you have any questions

FortOsageScholarBowl wrote:The set is regular difficulty but is aimed at Novice players (Freshmen and Sophomores), and will largely stick to that canon.

Could you help me understand what this means in terms of the set's overall difficulty? Would it be accurate to say, based on what you've written here, that you've chosen primarily very easy answerlines, but that otherwise the set is written to IS-level (or above) in terms of clue content (e.g. a tossup on "Shakespeare" is written rather than a tossup on "Othello," but said question would, taken alone, fit better into a regular difficulty set than a novice set)?

I chose topics that would fit within a typical 9-10th grade classroom in a high school in the U.S. There will be some middle school level topics (for example, in our district, Early American History from 1600-1865 is covered in 8th grade), but largely HS level material. In literature and other areas, there will be some higher level Jr. and Sr. material, but the emphasis is on Novice level stuff. With regards to the question strands, the first clue is powermarked and would be a difficult clue for maybe 70-80% of Novice players at your average HS. The second clue is partially powermarked and is in the 50% range. The final, non-powermarked clue should be accessible for most Novice players. In the KCMO area where we are located there are very few well-written Novice sets (most schools use housewrites that are not 20/20, or are written with the easy stuff at the beginning). We just hope to provide another resource. Once schools have used the SCOP set (which is an absolutely phenomenal set), they really can't have any other Novice tournaments, without using a MS set (which I personally find demeaning to HS kids). Hence, why we have written our set. I hope this helps.

We will get a date for spring.

crbirdx wrote:We will be mirroring this set at Waverly HS on 11/14/15

Shouldn't this be in the spring, since Mr. Malecki said that it wouldn't be available until then?

We would be pushing it to have the set ready before January. We are hopeful to have it packetized and ready for practice by December 1st. That way we can work out any issues during the month of December, which is our slowest part of the season. I will start posting updates, now that the school year is under way. Hopefully, we will get some more interest the closer we get to January.

Since we are a brand new set (from a school that likely no one has ever heard of, except for Albert Pujols fans!), I thought I would share a Sample packet, just so you have an idea of what we are about.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kDt ... BGRII/edit

It is a GoogleDoc, if that is an issue for anyone.

I looked through the sample packet, and I feel like maybe many of the early clues aren't necessarily relevant nor do they add meaning to the question. Also, this may just be my feeling, but this set feels harder to power than an IS set with many weird clues showing up before the power mark which is usually followed by a difficulty cliff. Those are just my thoughts though.

Lo,
I see your point very well. There is definitely a cliff, but I can tell you that the process was that all teams "should" be able to get the question by the end, which I feel should happen. The issue that we considered was that in order to market it to East Coast and West Coast schools, we would have to "up" the difficulty, but still stick to the Novice canon (that was simply out of necessity, since there are so many Varsity-housewrites, along with NAQT sets). In the KC-area, the competition is, to put it succinctly, not as strong. That fact changes as you head to Central Missouri and the St. Louis area. We could write a KC-level Novice set, but I feel that it would be a disappointment to all who attempted to play it. We are actually very interested to see an SQBS breakdown, when it is used. If there are few powers, then we know to ramp down the difficulty. If not, then the status quo remains. It may turn out that it functions better as a Varsity-level set, but I guess we'll see. This year will tell...

FortOsageScholarBowl wrote:There is definitely a cliff, but I can tell you that the process was that all teams "should" be able to get the question by the end, which I feel should happen.

This is not the complaint against the questions presented. The issue is not that you've tried to cover multiple difficulties; it's that you have two distinct sections in each tossup, one of which is difficult and the other of which is very easy, and there are no medium-difficulty clues that connect them. You need to focus heavily on working on how you're addressing the middle of your questions to ensure that you've got a smooth slope of difficulty from beginning to end, rather than a sharp descent from one to the other.

Think of it this way: No clue is simply a clue. Every clue represents the players who will buzz in at a given point in a tossup. You want to reward people who have in-depth knowledge first (e.g. those who have read a novel), then the people who have studied the plot points (as from SparkNotes), then the people who know the characters, and finally the people who have a binary awareness that an author wrote a particular book. The complaint posted above is not that you've tried to do too much (after all, every well-written set attempts to differentiate between players of many skill levels), but that you've ignored the second and third groups in my example in many of your questions.

Looking over the tossups, in particular, there's another issue that would greatly improve your set if addressed in the final product. Try to pay more attention to how you use powers. A powermark should go before the first substantive word that displays "ten-point" knowledge. When placing a powermark, think carefully about what specific word (the name of a character or a compound, for example) is the first word that you think deserves ten points instead of fifteen. You've currently got powermarks before words like "is," and there's just no reason for that word to make any difference in determining whether a player knows her subject or not.

If you work hard on the middle sections of your questions, I'll be excited to see the final product. The circuit desperately needs another novice-level set, and I hope yours becomes one that I can recommend :)

FONS Update:

Packetizing is going slower than anticipated, but the holidays will provide a lot of finishing time. Packets are a little over half done, with progress increasing. If anyone is till interested in this set, please e-mail me [email protected]

Packetizing is complete!!! There is no better feeling. Brookwood will be using it this weekend, so I am excited to see how the stats play out. Remember, if anyone still would like to use this set, I will keep it open through May.

Is this set ready?

It is all complete and packetized! 11 rounds, 22 Tossups/Bonuses per round.

Awesome we will use this as our in house tournament!

Will there be a private discussion set up for this set? My team played this at Brookwood and they were not happy with how certain questions played out.

Coach,
I have placed a request for one of these from the Board. I also have a GoogleForm that will only go to me, that has a place for opinion on the question set. Here is the link:

https://docs.google.com/a/fortosage.net ... M/viewform

Please let me know if the form is not working.

FortOsageScholarBowl wrote:I have placed a request for one of these from the Board.

This has been created. Select "2016 Fort Osage Novice discussion" from your user control panel for access.

With one mirror remaining (our own), this set is almost done for the year. If anyone would like it for a interschool competition or any other competition, please let me know. We can negotiate a lower per team price than the current $10 fee.

The set has been posted. We enjoyed writing and hosting the tournament using this set so much that we have decided to do it all over again!! FONS II will be available for schools to mirror for the 2016-17 school year. More details to come.

FortOsageScholarBowl wrote:We enjoyed writing and hosting the tournament using this set so much that we have decided to do it all over again!! FONS II will be available for schools to mirror for the 2016-17 school year. More details to come.

Let me start by saying that I'm glad for your enthusiasm, and I'm very happy that everybody involved had great fun. In fact, I'm impressed that the question set reached completion, as I know firsthand the terrible slogging deathmarch that writing can get to be a month before the deadline. I'd like to note a thing or two about the set now that the questions are publicly posted, especially since you seem determined to go another round.

The first thing that comes to mind: powermarks generally go directly before a proper noun or other significantly identifying word. For instance, if I were writing a completely hypothetical tossup on Jamestown, the sentence in which power ends might look something like this:

hypothetical tossup wrote:Before being reinforced by Lord De La Warr, this settlement experienced the (*) Starving Time.

Essentially, if a player has deeper knowledge of the Jamestown colony (this was a place visited by a guy named De La Warr) they will be able to get more points than someone who doesn't know that but who knows that the Starving Time was a thing. Compare that to the following question taken from FONS I:

Round 1 TU2 wrote:This element has the highest atomic number of all the stable elements,(*)​ and its only common allotrope is face­centered cubic

If a person buzzes at the words "and its only," do they really have more in-depth knowledge than someone who buzzes at "elements"? This does not go into the factual correctness of the questions, or the choice of their answers, but as a stylistic quibble it might be easiest to fix.

I wish the Fort Osage team best of luck in their future quizbowl endeavors.