2007-08 NAQT IS sets: Discuss Specific Questions

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2007-08 NAQT IS sets: Discuss Specific Questions

Post by ... and the chaos of Mexican modernity »

I have been hearing that a lot of people did not like IS-76 because of bad questions. I played with my team on this packet and I just wanted to know what you guys thought the problems with the questions were?
Last edited by ... and the chaos of Mexican modernity on Tue Jul 01, 2008 11:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: A Bad Packet?

Post by The Atom Strikes! »

The complaints about this set were endemic to all of this year's NAQT IS-Sets-- poor clue placement, silly answer selection, and the distribution issues that people have had with NAQT for a long time (ie: the fact that they include tons of Trash, lots of geography, lots of CE, and that they include comp math at all). Of course, IS-76 was an awesome set compared to IS-70, which, in my opinion, was probably the worst set of pyramidal questions that I have ever played on in High School.
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Re: A Bad Packet?

Post by Down and out in Quintana Roo »

Definitely shouldn't discuss specific questions here about a particular set since it's a recent one that will be played at tourneys next year. But i guess general things are alright.
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Re: A Bad Packet?

Post by Gautam »

Chief Pride wrote:I have been hearing that a lot of people did not like IS-76 because of bad questions, I played with my team on this packet and I just wanted to know what you guys thought the problems with the questions were?
I can tell you for sure that one packet I played on contained really terrible clue placement for the first 10 tossups. When I played it, there were 9 powers in the first 10 tossups. I don't know what packet number it is, but I can point you to it if you want.

On the other hand, there were some that I thought were pretty hard to be put in an is set. They were cool tossups, but they just didn't belong to an IS set.

Math was also an issue. In the games I played, the first math question from each packet was eliminated, and even that resulted in ~ 2 math tossups being read in the 20 questions.

It was certainly much better than IS 72, IS 70, and IS 74.

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Re: A Bad Packet?

Post by AndyShootsAndyScores »

Caesar Rodney HS wrote:Definitely shouldn't discuss specific questions here about a particular set since it's a recent one that will be played at tourneys next year. But i guess general things are alright.
Aren't NAQT questions cleared for discussion by July?
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Re: A Bad Packet?

Post by Down and out in Quintana Roo »

Even for the most recent packet that will be played at schools next year?

I guess you're right though, technically.

Also, where did you play this packet, Henry? I don't see on the schedule which tournament you would have been at that used this set, unless it's just missing. http://www.naqt.com/assigned-packet-sets.jsp
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Re: A Bad Packet?

Post by AndyShootsAndyScores »

Caesar Rodney HS wrote:Even for the most recent packet that will be played at schools next year?
I think that falls more under the TD taking that risk of using that set.
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Re: A Bad Packet?

Post by millionwaves »

As per an e-mail that I recently received from R. Hentzel, it is officially ok to discuss specific questions from all NAQT sets from this year.

If you expect to attend a tournament using questions from this year's NAQT sets, or if you practice on them or whatever, you're on your honor not to cheat. Please don't cheat.
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Re: A Bad Packet?

Post by Irreligion in Bangladesh »

I'm gonna throw this in here at this point in the discussion before any specifics --

The Decemberist is going to be using an NAQT set from this past year, so Illinois players should probably stay out of this thread.
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Re: A Bad Packet?

Post by Important Bird Area »

SwissBoy wrote:poor clue placement, silly answer selection
If anyone has specific examples of these from the history questions, please send me feedback (jthoppes @ berkeley ) so that IS #77 and beyond can be improved. Thanks.
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Re: A Bad Packet?

Post by STPickrell »

I think the title of this thread should be changed so unsuspecting folks know there is discussion of this year's IS sets.

My own opinion is that demand for NAQT is growing to the point where quality begins to suffer somewhat.

Let's also put this into perspective -- are we talking really bad, or just sub-optimal? (I know R isn't that thin-skinned but I don't know what would happen if he decides to throw in the towel.)

From all I have heard so far, the questions do seem sub-optimal for advanced HS teams. The top 25 HS teams are on a par with most college JV teams these days, it seems, and so an IS set that can be challenging/fun for median/high-median HS teams might be a bit deficient for a top 25 team.
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Re: A Bad Packet?

Post by Ondes Martenot »

Having played on most NAQT sets this year, I can say IS-76 was probably the best NAQT set I've played on. It was intended (I think), for state championships which made the questions somewhat more challenging. Nevertheless, my two biggest concerns/complaints
1. A couple of really stupid pop culture questions
2. More alarming than that were REPEAT QUESTIONS!!!!!. I recgonized several lead-ins from old packets (maybe a year or two ago) and went in for some uber powers. Obviously NAQT is going to have numerous questions on same topic, but to use the exact same lead-in is not acceptable. I would give examples although I take it we're still not allowed to talk about specific questions/answers from sets.

I agree with Henry that it was definitely better than some other sets. While I'm not one of those bash-NAQT guys, in mid May I played a tournament on IS-72 which I felt had completely unacceptable power marks and in general was just very easy.

Yes I agree that top teams (and I'm including my own team as a top team) have outgrown regular IS sets, although I hear that a lot of teams complain they're too hard (is this actually true?) so I don't know what the solution will be...

p.s.
I'll sending you (jthoppes@berkeley) and discussing some issues with the history questions.
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Re: A Bad Packet?

Post by AKKOLADE »

aarcoh wrote:I would give examples although I take it we're still not allowed to talk about specific questions/answers from sets.
You are allowed to discuss question specifics.
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Re: NAQT IS Discussion Thread

Post by Matt Weiner »

Is there some reason why NAQT is selling packets that were already used this past year for next year's tournaments? Aren't they producing another 6 to 8 sets for next year? How do they possibly plan to maintain question security for that long?
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Re: NAQT IS Discussion Thread (Discuss Specific Questions Here)

Post by harpersferry »

This is a side question: are the IS sets are numbered continuously? That is, next year's sets will start with 77?
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Re: NAQT IS Discussion Thread (Discuss Specific Questions Here)

Post by ClemsonQB »

pasedpawn wrote:This is a side question: are the IS sets are numbered continuously? That is, next year's sets will start with 77?
Yes, IS-77 will be a regular set, IS-78 will be an A set, etc. The catch is to remember that now the odd numbers are regular and the evens A sets.
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Re: NAQT IS Discussion Thread (Discuss Specific Questions Here)

Post by cdcarter »

IS-70, probably the worse set NAQT wrote this year. But the really exciting one was IS-74. Lets take a look shall we? In packet 2 in the first 20 the distribution is as follows
Science: 4/5
Arts: 1/1
History: 3/4
Math Comp: 1/0
Geography: 2/2
General Knowledge: 2/0
Trash: 1/2
Current Events: 3/0
Lit: 2/4
RMP: 1/2
Neither of those lit TUs were in the first 10 [1]. And this is being verry loose about what constitutes some of these categories.

This is from the packet with great tossups on things like "autism", "tornado(s)", "Mars", "diamonds", "Registered sex offenders" and "The Order of Skull and Bones"....

[1]: See http://www.doc-ent.com/qbwiki/index.php ... _feng_shui
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Re: NAQT IS Discussion Thread (Discuss Specific Questions Here)

Post by Ondes Martenot »

While I don't think tossups on autism, mars, diamonds or tornadoes are that bad, yeah IS-74 wasn't great. I mean, from what I remember it wasn't that bad, or maybe my memory is fuzzy. Now IS-72 featured such exciting tossups as:
Tossups on the Mali empire with Timbuktu still in power
Tossups on Flaubert that mentioned A Simple Heart in the lead in
Tossups on Brecht with Mother Courage and her Children very early in the question
Tossups on the Taj Mahal with "large onion shaped dome" still in power

In IS-76, the set used for most state championships, the questions on Cal Ripken Jr, Brazil and Cape Horn had lead-ins that I'm almost positive I've heard before. There was also a tossup on Amy Winehouse and a bonus on the puppy bowl, among others.

p.s.-I played IS-70 way back in October and my memory is rather fuzzy (except for a horrible tossup on the Magna Carta that mentioned "forced the king to sign it in 1215" still in power"). Could someone provide me with some concrete examples of bad questions to refresh my memory?
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Re: NAQT IS Discussion Thread (Discuss Specific Questions Here)

Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

Ugh, why does NAQT ask about the puppy bowl?
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Re: NAQT IS Discussion Thread (Discuss Specific Questions Here)

Post by Important Bird Area »

aarcoh wrote: a horrible tossup on the Magna Carta that mentioned "forced the king to sign it in 1215" still in power").
Not so much:
NAQT wrote:Most of its clauses 47 through 63 address temporary situations like Forest Law and the persecution of the Welsh, and while only clauses 1, 9, and 29 of its 1297 version remain in actual force, four clauses of its original version led to the right of (*) {habeas [HAY-bee-us] corpus}. The subject of Rudyard Kipling's "What Say the Reeds at Runnymede?" is--for 10 points--what 1215 document that nobles forced upon England's King John?
The tossup on Mali did indeed have overly generous power.
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Re: NAQT IS Discussion Thread (Discuss Specific Questions Here)

Post by The Atom Strikes! »

In I think IS-76, there was a tossup on Kenya which started with "Raila Odinga"
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Re: NAQT IS Discussion Thread (Discuss Specific Questions Here)

Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

I know in IS-74 I refused to take a power on Lizst when "Hungarian Rhapsodies" had already been said. Also, in the same set there was a bad hose on the Carribean Sea tossup where I buzzed in off of Mosquito Coast with Nicaragua because it didn't make it clear they didn't want a country.
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Re: NAQT IS Discussion Thread (Discuss Specific Questions Here)

Post by ihavenoidea »

Yes, on which my teammate negged with Kibaki...

IS 74: Kepler tossup with Brahe in power
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Re: NAQT IS Discussion Thread (Discuss Specific Questions Here)

Post by Important Bird Area »

I'm seeing a lot of complaints about power marks here, which I think are a rather different complaint from "poor clue placement." To me, poor clue placement means a question that fails pyramidality, not just a question that has an inappropriately late power zone.

For instance, here's the offending Kenya tossup:
IS-74 wrote:Opposition leader Raila Odinga, a member of the Luo ethnic group, claimed victory in this nation's December 2007 presidential election. Nevertheless incumbent Mwai Kibaki of the dominant (*) Kikuyu was hastily sworn in, sparking riots that killed over 400 people in--for 10 points--what east African nation whose capital is Nairobi?
Is that going to cause a buzzer race when Charter plays another nationally-ranked team? Probably. However, I think it's still clearly pyramidal.
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Re: NAQT IS Discussion Thread

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Matt Weiner wrote:Is there some reason why NAQT is selling packets that were already used this past year for next year's tournaments? Aren't they producing another 6 to 8 sets for next year? How do they possibly plan to maintain question security for that long?
We used a 2006-07 set at our kickoff tournament last year, and it was strictly for monetary purposes. They offered a discount to about 1/3 the usual price, and considering the tournament's free admission and minimal budget, we couldn't have used NAQT questions otherwise. We can get away with it up here, though, because so few of our teams travel. I don't think we've ever had a team play more than four NAQT sets in a season, and NAQT confirmed beforehand that it hadn't sold the questions as practice material to any of the teams up here.
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Re: NAQT IS Discussion Thread (Discuss Specific Questions Here)

Post by Blackboard Monitor Vimes »

On that TU, my entire team (final ranking according to Mr. Bykowski: 64th in the nation) got confused enough by Odinga in the first clue to lose the question to whoever we were playing. That happened many more times than it should have while playing NAQT this year, leading some of us to play differently on NAQT than anything else. Thus, what I see as more of a problem with that question is not the buzzer race between teams with sense enough to buzz on something that seems "too obvious" but rather the questions that drag on too long due to teams thinking that the answer is "too easy" to be the answer, potentially preventing other questions from being read in timed rounds. I noticed this occurring more often on strange wording than "allegedly" misplaced clues (wording due to a lack of desire to argue about the pyramidality of the specifc example above), but it still happens more than it should.
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Re: NAQT IS Discussion Thread (Discuss Specific Questions Here)

Post by Ondes Martenot »

Ugh, why does NAQT ask about the puppy bowl?
Excellent question...I have no idea. The sad part was that this bonus was in a late packet, and it was somewhere near bonus 20 (or maybe it was bonus 20), which potentially means this could have been the deciding bonus in the final game at a state championship. So Team X can say "we lost states in the final because we didn't know enough about the puppy bowl".
I'm seeing a lot of complaints about power marks here, which I think are a rather different complaint from "poor clue placement."
Well, sort of. There are two types of bad power: ones that start off a question with easy information and ones that just extend too far into the question. I mean, a question on Flaubert that has A Simple Heart as the lead in is poor clue placement because it naturally leads to a buzzer race if its a game involving teams that are somewhat above average or better. Questions where the power marks just extend too long are not as bad but in general cause the idea of power to lose credibility.

I think in general there are more top teams then there used to, meaning opposition to NAQT has gotten more vocal as more players practice on material far more difficult than anything NAQT has to offer. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if NAQT questions have roughly stayed the same difficulty while the players are more willing to improve.
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Re: NAQT IS Discussion Thread (Discuss Specific Questions Here)

Post by AKKOLADE »

Deesy Does It wrote:Ugh, why does NAQT ask about the puppy bowl?
This question coming to a NAC set near you.
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Re: NAQT IS Discussion Thread (Discuss Specific Questions Here)

Post by cdcarter »

This has been said over and over again, but I will repeat it anyway. Power is just a free 5 points. That's it. Don't complain about a question having extended power. Complain about clue order if necessary. If power just runs long, luck you.
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Re: NAQT IS Discussion Thread (Discuss Specific Questions Here)

Post by DumbJaques »

Is that going to cause a buzzer race when Charter plays another nationally-ranked team? Probably. However, I think it's still clearly pyramidal.
Surely a tossup that is just over three lines can have opening clues that go a bit beyond "Raila Odinga." I will go ahead and submit that if you're writing questions that, theoretically, are supposed to be pyramidal, you should not strive to have buzzer races on the third word between two nationally ranked teams. This isn't even a problem with answer difficulty or making the question appropriate for every team out there. This is a three line tossup. Add another sentence of clues, stop saying "Raila Odinga" in the first few words. Also, it's probably not a great idea to have two substantive clues (Odinga, Luo) before you get to the pronoun, as a general rule.

It's basic stuff like this that leads people to make the comments their making in this thread, about how some of these IS sets appear to have quality issues and how they find playing on NAQT questions an inconsistent experience.

NAQT's character limit is what, 450 or so? This clocks out at 333. I will also go ahead and submit that the tossup is just too short. It's basically one protracted clue (stuff about the recent election violence), which is also not the greatest structure. I've also noticed things like this in some IS sets, particularly current events. NAQT is going to get zero complaints about a tossup on Kenya if that tossup had 2 more lines of pyramidal clues - why not put them in?

In a more general sense, what's with the character limit thing anyway? Surely it takes more time for a writer to have to play around with something like that (that you have to check and recheck and sometimes whip out the thesaurus to trim the tossup down) then it would to even add an extra couple clues. Eyeballing a line limit is much easier and I can't see how it would affect the player's experience with question length.
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Re: NAQT IS Discussion Thread (Discuss Specific Questions Here)

Post by Gautam »

IS 76:

Tossup on Entomologists which mentioned Vladmir Nabokov early.
Tossup on Helium, with no buzzable clues until "exhibits superfluidity" or something of the sort
Tossup on "language families" which I remember being somewhat questionable - I think this listed some of the more famous language families somewhat early.
Tossup on "agism," which, almost certainly, was a bad idea.

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Re: NAQT IS Discussion Thread (Discuss Specific Questions Here)

Post by First Chairman »

leftsaidfred wrote:
Deesy Does It wrote:Ugh, why does NAQT ask about the puppy bowl?
This question coming to a NAC set near you.
If we posted the text, it will definitely be part of some NAC set, won't it? :wink:

To answer Charlie's question: no one can resist the sight of playful puppies. (I suppose.)
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Re: 2007-08 NAQT IS sets: Discuss Specific Questions

Post by theMoMA »

Yeah, complaining about power placement is pretty far down the list of issues with questions. I don't really mind the more inane pop culture stuff that inevitably comes up; a lot of the outrage over asking questions on Puppy Bowl or Miley Cyrus or whatever seems misguided because I don't really think there's good criteria for what should come up as trash. Roll your eyes if you must, but I don't think this should be a major point of criticism either.

For the most part, the NAQT sets I've read this year have been alright, if a bit easy. I think too often the biggest problems are also the problems with NAQT college questions; the strange wordings and less-than-ideal pronoun insertions that writers and editors use to get under the 425 character limit, and the tendency to pick borderline academic answers when the packets are already heavy distributed away from academic categories compared to other good formats.

In the high school sets, there seem to be a not-insignificant minority of questions that contain rambling anecdotes, pronounless leadins, really vague early clues, etc. NAQT's "X, Y, both, or neither" bonuses seem to show up more in high school too, and are bad quizbowl, I think.

The problem where the straight-up definition of something is given in the first line of a tossup shows up sometimes, as does the troubling issue of the first-clue giveaway. These are the most pressing (and easy) things for NAQT to fix, because they really do make IS set matches between top teams a test of chance instead of knowledge.

All that said, here's the thing...IS sets are pretty good high school quizbowl. They undoubtedly have frustrating systematic flaws that could be improved. They might be a little too easy to effectively distinguish between the top teams, but NAQT wrote a really good, appropriate-difficulty HSNCT for that. The tone of this thread is way out of proportion to the actual flaws of IS sets for high schoolers.
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Re: 2007-08 NAQT IS sets: Discuss Specific Questions

Post by Blackboard Monitor Vimes »

While the clue placement issue has already been brought up, I just remembered another glaring example: Aureliano Buendia way too early into a 100 Years of Solitude question. This was in the set used at the tournament hosted at Collegiate but run by VCU, which I think was 76 but may have been 74. If I remember correctly, it was around the second clue. I haven't read it, but I know several people who have and I've listened to them talk about it: there are a lot more clues that could have been used ahead of that. The name Aureliano Buendia shouldn't appear until the next to last clue or so.

So, while some clue "misplacement" is going to occur due to people having different opinions/depths of knowledge, stuff that blatant shouldn't happen. I think it's issues like that that are the major source of complaints of this type...
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Re: 2007-08 NAQT IS sets: Discuss Specific Questions

Post by Stained Diviner »

I generally agree with Andrew. The Kenya question would only be a travesty if both teams were pretty good at current events, and it would be a better question if what is now the first sentence was actually the second sentence, and the first sentence contained tougher clues.

One of the things that could make NAQT tossups a little better is if their tossups were less transparent. Looking at the Magna Carta question--it's about something that's got a lot of clauses and mentions forests and the Welsh, and it's in an IS Set, so it's a good guess that it's the Magna Carta even if you've never studied the Magna Carta in depth. The year 1297 pretty much seals the deal if you're paying attention.

I've got IS-66 Packet 10 in front of me, so here's some similar issues:
Production of this 1981 film...
The first American one was located on Little Brewster Island in Boston, while the second was on Nantucket...
This island's Karluk River has a famed summer-long salmon run...
(after an obscure DAR reference) A schoolhouse by this former Cedar Rapids art teacher...
From Packet 11:
Kim Carnes, Bob Dylan, and Ray Charles are the last three featured vocalists on this 1985 #1 song...
It called for an end to secret treaties; freedom of the seas; the evacuation of Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro...
They were first observed by Europeans during a 1519-1522 circumnavigation of the globe but were not named for the leader of that voyage until several centuries later...
A splintered old black box is brought from the offices of the local coal company, filled with little slips of paper... (bad grammar to boot)

This problem is not endemic to all questions--I'm picking out the ones with problems and finding about four per match. In a typical match, there would be fewer than four problems because the teams aren't great or because the teams decide to wait to see if their hunch is correct. They are the type of questions that make you think, "Is it really ______?" In an IS set, because the answer space is limited to what a typical high school team can answer, it really is ______.

It's not like these questions are completely illegitimate. My team was about the 25th best in the country this year. If we played a team that wasn't in the top 200 (which is the vast majority), we would beat them every time. If we played a team that wasn't in the top 100, we would only lose to them if we earned the loss. If we played a team in the top 5, we were going to lose. The problem came if we played a team close in ability to us. You want to win or lose based on knowledge, but it could just as easily come down to which team got the miscellaneous questions or which team picked the right questions to guess on. This isn't entirely NAQT's fault, since that's the nature of matches between teams of roughly equal abilities, but I also think NAQT could do a better job of differentiating between teams in a meaningful way if they reduced/cut miscellaneous/pop culture and if they reduced the guesswork.

We do hold NAQT to a high standard. Most of the companies that sell questions don't even try to be good and couldn't hold a candle to NAQT. So it goes.
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Re: 2007-08 NAQT IS sets: Discuss Specific Questions

Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

So, the reason I have a problem with puppy bowl is that 1) it's not really something well known, as opposed to oodles of more well known trash topics that could be written on, and 2) it's come up multiple times in NAQT sets, which is absurd. If it were only once, eh, whatever, I'd let it slide.
Onto more substantial things you're saying Andrew -
All that said, here's the thing...IS sets are pretty good high school quizbowl. They undoubtedly have frustrating systematic flaws that could be improved. They might be a little too easy to effectively distinguish between the top teams, but NAQT wrote a really good, appropriate-difficulty HSNCT for that. The tone of this thread is way out of proportion to the actual flaws of IS sets for high schoolers.
I don't disagree that if every high school tournament were run on IS sets, the average quality of high school quizbowl would be increased by an absurd amount. However, the problem is that these sets really do become a crapshoot for high school sets (even at HSNCT this year that was shown when Dorman A got 5th below the decidedly worse Dorman B, and Charter, a team who we can all agree is objectively not the 2nd best team n the nation, got within a game of winning a national title. Now, this could be a criticism of double elim bracketing, but this is also affected by packets.) The reason there is all this frustration in the thread is because top teams lose their enjoyment playing on these sets against each other because of the fact that almost always tournament placements become rather meaningless crapshoots, and you come out of the games feeling "ugh, that packet really screwed us over, who knows what would have happened if it were on a different packet." Ryan Westbrook once made a post that I very much identify with, which is that NAQT is much more prone to upsets just by question style, as opposed to games at ACF where, even if you are upset, you come out thinking "well, they showed they were smarter" or else you think "oh, I shouldn't have negged so much" or whatever, but you can much more easily point to some reason why the game result happened that is satisfying. NAQT packets don't provide this easy pointing, which is why people have problems. In general, I feel that NAQT IS sets are unacceptable tournament sets for higher level tournaments, and that is why the frustration is coming out here. Also, the length limits are the most maddening thing ever. I tried writing tossups with 425 character limits because I had been approached about writing for NAQT, and I became so frustrated because I realized that my submitted questions were going to be forced into being less well written than I could potentially make them by adding a line or 2, and I can't in good faith provide anything less than the best questions I can write for top teams to be playing on. I guess this is my own personal problem that I'm airing, but I do want NAQT to realize that this system they have going of absurdly low character limits is creating tossups that are less than optimal for high school games between the top 50 teams in the nation, and that as the top 50 keep improving they will drift further and further away, and that this limit needs to go if they actually want to please teams. I guess I'm frustrated, but this policy has lost NAQT a writer who could probably otherwise provide some pretty decent additions to their sets, and until their policies allow writers to submit their best work, I will certainly never work for them.
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Re: 2007-08 NAQT IS sets: Discuss Specific Questions

Post by First Chairman »

Charile,
Wow... your last post really made me think about a lot of assumptions when it comes to the creation of the IS and IS-A packets compared to the "national set" of questions. I will agree that the set of IS questions should reach out in difficulty (or rather ease here) to a broader spectrum of teams, but if the IS packets get to the point where they no longer emulate the NAQT HSCT set, then prediction value based on statistics throughout the year can get skewed when it comes to final interpretation. I hadn't really observed this as being a potential problem, but it may explain how expectations of NAQT questions are formed at the local level and get totally dispelled at the national one. It is easy to chalk the difference to being a "national event," but national-caliber teams shouldn't have to drastically adjust to questions at the local level if their stats are going to be meaningful for "ranking" purposes.

The Bykowski ratings does a great job, but I wonder how any of the other metrics can fluctuate to affect any of the national "ratings."
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Re: 2007-08 NAQT IS sets: Discuss Specific Questions

Post by cdcarter »

Charlie, thank you for finally saying what I have been trying to articulate and failing for a while now. I fully endorse that post.
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Re: 2007-08 NAQT IS sets: Discuss Specific Questions

Post by Maxwell Sniffingwell »

Heckuva post, Charlie.

Off topic, though:
ReinsteinD wrote:(after an obscure DAR reference) A schoolhouse by this former Cedar Rapids art teacher...
Was the reference to Daughters of the Revolution? If so, that's an actual clue.
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Re: 2007-08 NAQT IS sets: Discuss Specific Questions

Post by wd4gdz »

theMoMA wrote: All that said, here's the thing...IS sets are pretty good high school quizbowl. They undoubtedly have frustrating systematic flaws that could be improved. They might be a little too easy to effectively distinguish between the top teams, but NAQT wrote a really good, appropriate-difficulty HSNCT for that. The tone of this thread is way out of proportion to the actual flaws of IS sets for high schoolers.
To summarize his summary, NAQT is pretty good. There are some small problems to fix, but having such a vitriolic tone probably isn't going to help anyone, imo.
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Re: 2007-08 NAQT IS sets: Discuss Specific Questions

Post by Stained Diviner »

Greg--Yes. Maybe I'm wrong about that one.

If there is a lot of agreement in this thread, then these ideas are worth contacting NAQT about. The two main complaints seem to be based on the distribution, which includes too many questions that are not academic, and length, which cuts down on early and middle clues that would differentiate between good teams. Those two things seem easier to fix then telling them to write and/or edit better.
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Re: 2007-08 NAQT IS sets: Discuss Specific Questions

Post by DumbJaques »

I don't think there's a problem with vitriol here. Nothing all that vitriolic has been said and I don't think anyone here would make the claim that NAQT is anything but a tremendous net gain for high school quizbowl. While Billy and Andrew make a good point about keeping the relative (and very significant) positives in mind, I think the criticism here is legitimate. More importantly, Reinstein nails it with this phrase:

Those two things seem easier to fix then telling them to write and/or edit better.
Most of the things we're identifying here are easy to fix. Either NAQT is operating from the area that they don't need to be "fixed" (say, for something like the distribution), which is cool, or they agree with the community consensus on things like making sure clues are not transparent and having tossups that are more than three lines long but for some reason a non-minuscule portion of questions seem to end up this way. Either way raising these issues seems pretty justified, and since these kind of things couldn't be discussed earlier due to the gag rule, this seems like the appropriate time and venue. I don't see how this discussion departs at all from how we post in a post-tournament discussion thread, which is essentially what this thread is, really.
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Re: 2007-08 NAQT IS sets: Discuss Specific Questions

Post by theattachment »

I hate to echo everything, but the major problems with NAQT this year basically cause one answer to a question:

"Is this honestly just (answer)?"

The problem seems to be a mix of some apyrimidal stuff (the Kenya question) and stuff that is apyrimidal due to good quizbowl taking over. Many clues this year seemed to give away the question early just because of how clues have panned themselves out in other packets instead of in actual knowledge. Unfortunately this causes a problem for writers that don't read other packets. Something that is seemingly obscure enough for a good lead-in in the normal world often doesn't work in a quizbowl environment, especially with the top teams playing the sets.

What it seems that NAQT needs to do is edit question structure with quizbowl in mind as well as normal knowledge. Normal and QB usage are two different animals nowadays, and when a question is transparent due to stock clues it needs editing.
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