The Quizbowl Resource Center

Hello,

I am pleased to announce Pennsylvania Novice 2016, available for mirrors between September 24th and May 31, 2017. The set is being written primarily by players from Carnegie Mellon and Penn State, and edited by Victor Prieto, Bill Tressler, Chris Chiego, Ben Herman, and Ryan Bilger.

This set is intended as an introduction to quizbowl for new high school teams. The difficulty will be the level of an NAQT A-set, and tossups will be powermarked and between 4.5 and 6 lines long in 11 point TNR (before powermarking). The set will contain 12 packets of twenty tossups and twenty bonuses each, with an extra tossup and bonus in each packet for tiebreakers or replacements. We've put together a sample packet, which we can show interested hosts to demonstrate the quality of the set.

The mirror fee is $12 per team, including house teams. There is a discount of $5 per team from a school which has not played a regular, high school academic quizbowl tournament before. If you are interested in using the set, please email me at wasabix10x at gmail.com.

Distribution
4/4 literature (1/1 American, 1/1 British, 1/1 European, 0.5/0.5 of the above, 0.5/0.5 world)
4/4 history (1.5/1.5 American, 1/1 European/British, 1/1 world, 0.5/0.5 ancient and mixed)
4/4 science (1/1 biology, 1/1 chemistry, 1/1 physics, 0.5/0.5 math, 0.5/0.5 other science)
3/3 fine arts (1/1 music, 1/1 painting, 0.5/0.5 visual other arts, 0.5/0.5 auditory other arts)
2.25/2.25 RMPSS (0.75/0.75 religion, 0.75/0.75 mythology, 0.25/0.25 philosophy, 0.5/0.5 social science)
1/1 geography
0.75/0.75 current events
1/1 trash and general knowledge

Thank you, and we hope to see our set used at novice high school events throughout the country!

This post reserved for mirrors:

Carver Fall Novice - October 8th @ Carver HSES (Philadelphia, PA)
Wheaton North - October 8th @ Wheaton North (Wheaton, IL)

Wofford Free - October 15th @ Wofford College (Spartanburg, SC)
RIFT - October 15th @ Rice University (Houston, TX)

Nittany Lion Novice II - November 12th @ Penn State (State College, PA)

Give Thanks for Matt’s Buzzers III - November 19th @ Olentangy Liberty (Powell, OH)

Bronco Bowl II - December 17th @ Rancho Bernardo (San Diego, CA)

Mexico Fall Novice Tournament - March 18th @ Mexico HS (Mexico, MO)

We''ll be mirroring this set at our Give Thanks for Matt's Buzzers tournament on 11/19/2016 in Powell, Ohio.

The set is currently at 87% written and 60% fully edited.

If you'd like to mirror this set, please go ahead and email us. It will be available right up until nationals next year, and is the perfect set to use for a JV division of a big tournament or a standalone tournament in a young region.

The set ran for the first time on Saturday, and I think overall it went quite well. We've corrected a number of grammar issues and clarified/added alternative answers to a few answerlines based on how they played at the mirror here in Philadelphia. If teams who played at the Illinois site want to provide feedback, feel free to email us at [email protected].

Please let us know if you want to mirror this elsewhere!

The tournament scheduled for March 18th, 2017 in Mexico, Missouri now has a new thread and name: the Bulldog Regional Interscholastic Challenge.