SnookerUSF wrote:Yeah, I don't know about this. What will inevitably happen is someone will equivocate on the "solidness" of the tossup rather than its ease, suggesting that while a particular answer space was "okay" there was something pathetically flawed about the tossup. This kind of comment generally relies on a silent or tacit acceptance of those who are unwilling to post that they :gasp: didn't know this clearly superfamous fact, and thus it becomes quickly filed away as "stock." While sometimes those types of complaints are legitimate, more often, they are a feature of the intellectual grandstanding you go on to talk about.
There are two reasons that someone would cram a whole bunch of way-too-hard stuff into a hard tossup on an easy answer:
1. The question author has some kind of perverse need to prove his intellectual prowess by including a bunch of clues that no one is expected to know.
2. The question author has serious doubts about "transparency" or fears that the middle clues that should be included will be attacked as "too easy" or showing up "too early."
I think both (1) and (2) are much more prevalent at the high school level than at the college level. For a lot of people, writing high school questions has devolved from "what can we reasonably expect the average high schooler to know?" to "how can I write this question so that I still hit 80% conversion but I don't have high school players and coaches (or worse, college players) complaining on the board that the question was too easy?". So what ends up happening is that we get canon expansion in the leadins of
high school questions, we get tossup answers and third bonus parts that are just not appropriate for many teams, and we get caught in the middle between your average local team complaining that the questions are too hard and the elite national team complaining that the questions are too easy.
Realistically, the reason that this gets better at the college level is that the truly elite players tend to complain only when clues are either (a) useless, (b) way too hard, or (c) rewards having no actual knowledge of the answer. But the fact remains that we have a lot of players who haven't outgrown the same mentality they had in high school. It's not just the young ones; heck, I'm not as guilty as a lot of people, but I'm still prone to the Fundamental Difficulty Error.
SnookerUSF wrote:Generally, I would claim that for an inexperienced writer, or for one who is inexperienced in some subcategory, the refuge from these kinds of complaints is generally a tossup on a more challenging answer. It seems clear that the backlash has begun in earnest in this regard, so perhaps there will be some kind of self-moderation not only in the question difficulty, but in the corrupting type of comments discussed above in response to this "kinder, gentler" quizbowl of the future. Forgive me though if I am a bit skeptical of the latter and thus the former.
Multiple choice question: you're a new editor who just signed onto the ACF Fall team after being identified as a young writer with editor potential, and you get some really good packets that you don't have to worry about, and you get some poor packets that you edit up to snuff, and you think, "hey, I did a pretty good job." And then you see the ACF Fall discussion and there's some freshman from a top-10 high school team last year complaining about "why the heck is the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect in the second line? And taq polymerase [which you put just before FTP]? That's so stock.". What are you thinking?
A. "This person probably knows as much or more than me about this. I should readjust my difficulty views accordingly."
B. "This person probably knows as much or more than me about this. I should get a second opinion from an older, elite player."
C. "I stand by my clue placement and this person needs to readjust his difficulty views accordingly."
D. "This person is a disciple of Ryan Westbrook and I should train myself to ignore all of his views on difficulty."
I would conjecture that your average new editor is probably answering A; a few lucky ones at programs driven by elite players might be thinking B.
SnookerUSF wrote:Moreover, I totally admit to being "intellectually insecure" about my questions, and it showed in the quirky non-distribution of SnF. Though this does not exculpate me in anyway; it behooves me to write tossups in areas I think I can write in, while criminally neglecting others. This should change.
First off, I think this whole "intellectual insecurity" is the reason why a lot of people
don't refute challenges to the difficulty of the question. Most of the time, person A will say "Bonus X was the easiest bonus of the tournament" and person B will look at the bonus and think "What are you talking about? I haven't even heard of the third part, and I might pull the second part on a good day after taking a final in that class." 99 times out of 100 person B will not post any such thing, because person B thinks posting such a thing implies person B's "intellectual inferiority" to person A. Really, it is only the elite players who really
can make this claim, because they've already found their intellectual security. Because they have the respect of just about everyone on the circuit, and because they have an excellent command of the subject, they can post that "I've never heard of Bonus X's third part" or that "Clue Y is not, in fact, too early" and the fault appears to lie with the question (and by extension, the person attacking it as too easy) rather than the person posting the rebuttal.
Second, I think most of us are intellectually insecure when it comes to our questions, especially when we're writing in areas we don't really know that well. My first two years of college I was responsible for just about every science question from those UCLA teams because even if I didn't know science all that well, I sure knew it better than the other people on the team. The point of this is that a lot of times you don't have the luxury of writing only in categories you can write competently; you have to write absolute crap in some subjects and ask for constructive criticism. It's much harder to take "that's too easy" complaints when you don't, in fact, know if whatever middle clue you randomly grabbed from Wikipedia and cross-checked with three ACF Regionals packets was really too easy.
SnookerUSF wrote:Also, I wonder if there are other reasons, if you believe quizbowl as gotten more impossible than ACF, besides the kind of "ad-hominem" reasons Matt points out. Could it be that there is a kind of category arms race as well? What I mean is that the transition from SCIENCE! to science, has prompted the exponents or devotees of other fields such as: Music, Social Science, Literature to respond in kind, and thus accelerating the canon solifluction into a full-on avalanche of impossibility. You might argue that this is a one-off of the ad-hominem claim, but I am inclined on quick reflection to believe that there is some legitimacy to this process anyway. If science, literature etc. insist on a "reality principle," that is, those who study the field either as a major, vocation (in the traditional sense), or hardcore enthusiast, ought to be rewarded first and most often, then all of the devotees in the other categories in the distribution feel like they ought to keep up in some fashion. The major problem in this becomes, given that few of us are qualified to judge relative difficulty, is that we are inclined to overshoot the mean in some hilariously difficult ways.
The reality of it is that we no longer have true "history" players, or "science" players, or whatever. We have people who have strangleholds on specific subcategories, and oftentimes are writing their leadins/third parts/hard-tournament questions for people who are of similar strengths in those categories. It's not so much a category arms race, as it is that the canon for each subcategory is
simultaneously expanding at a rate roughly proportional to (# quizbowlers at an elite playing level), with minor corrections for (average writing ability of the elite players). Elite players will generally write their high-end questions to challenge other elite players, because "hey there's this cool thing that other elite players might have heard of and if they haven't they might want to know about it," while everyone else is going to stick to "hey there's this thing that has come up before, so even if it's unimportant, I can point to this other question as evidence that people might know it." There is now a critical mass of elite CS players, so the CS canon is expanding quite significantly given that there's < 1 CS question per packet. There aren't a lot of elite earth science players, so expansion in that subcategory is much slower than it is in CS, because people are sticking to the "tried and true" answers and clues in earth science and there aren't as many people at the elite level or the fringe of the category who can (and want to) write for other people at that level.