The Quizbowl Resource Center

The Academic Buzzer Team at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign is pleased to announce ILLIAC (ILLInois Academic Competition), an ACF Fall plus difficulty set (a la MUT, EMT, and SMT), or approximately 1 1/2 dots on the calendar. This means that the difficulty will be between ACF Fall and ACF regs, but will skew towards Fall. The set will consist of 14 packets, plus a tiebreaker half packet. Tossups will be capped at 7 lines in TNR 11 pt pre-power marking.

The set will be written by members of the UIUC and Uni High teams with help from Alex Dzurick, Eric Murkherjee, and the Centennial High School team. Mike Etzkorn and Cole Timmerwilke will serve as head editors with science help from Mike Sorice. Bradley McLain, Mitch McCullar, Bryan Lu and Koby Theobald will also be serving on the editing team. Itamar Naveh-Benjamin, John Lawrence, and Tyler Vaughan will also be assisting with difficulty control, copy-editing, and quality control.

Eligibility

The eligibility policy is similar to past years’ MUT, EMT, SMT. Only undergraduate and high school students can play this tournament. "Undergraduate" in this case does not follow the traditional ACF definition--fifth-year (or greater) undergraduates with no bachelor's-level degree are still eligible to play. Less-experienced grad students (i.e. grad students who have not played a tournament before this school year, with slight exceptions granted at our discretion) can request permission directly from the editors to play the set, and if granted will be able to play at a mirror. Otherwise, they will not be allowed to play. All mirrors will be closed mirrors, meaning that chimera teams will not be allowed except in extenuating circumstances, which must be approved by both the editing team and the hosts. Sites may allow both high school and college teams into the same field, but must ask the editors for permission first.

Distribution

4/4 Literature
-> 1/1 Long-Form Fiction
-> 1/1 Non-Epic Poetry
-> 0.5/0.5 Drama
-> 0.5/0.5 Short-Form Fiction
-> 1/1 "Miscellaneous" (nonfiction, literary criticism, epic poetry, other literary questions, mixed, or more drama/short fiction)

4/4 History
-> 1/1 United States
-> 1/1 Continental Europe
-> 1/1 Non-European, Non-Commonwealth ("World")
-> 1/1 Classics, Commonwealth, and Other

4/4 Science
-> 1/1 Biology
-> 1/1 Chemistry
-> 1/1 Physics
-> 0.5/0.5 Math/Computer Science
-> 0.5/0.5 Other Science

3/3 Arts
-> 1/1 Painting and Sculpture
-> 1/1 Music
-> 1/1 "Other" Art

4/4 RMPSS
-> 1/1 Religion (expansive)
-> 1/1 Mythology (inc. questions about mythography/folktales)
-> 1/1 Philosophy (with emphasis on "thought")
-> 1/1 Social Science (with emphasis on "practice")

1/1 Geography/Current Events/Misc.


The mirror fee for this set will be $40 per team in attendance

All mirror requests and questions regarding the set should be sent to bamclai2 AT illinois.edu

The set will be available for mirroring starting March 2nd.

College Mirrors
We are actively pursuing mirrors in all of the following regions. If you feel that you can host a viable mirror in a region not listed below, please feel free to send us an email.
New England - Brown - April 20th
Mid-Atlantic - Johns Hopkins (HS allowed) - March 31st
South Central
Southeast - Florida - March 16th
South
Pacific Northwest
Southern California
Northern California Stanford - April 27th
North
Great Lakes
Midwest - UIUC - March 23rd
Mountain West - BYU (HS allowed) - March 2nd
Canada
UK Oxford - TBD (sometime in May)

High School Mirrors
(see high school announcement )

What's the difficulty of the set supposed to be? MUT, SMT and EMT are all 2.0 difficulty by Ophir's difficulty scale but the OP states a difficulty level of 1.5.
Additionally, MUT/SMT/EMT are basically the same difficulty level as EFT, but the set is advertised as between ACF Fall and EFT level.

Edit: the OP was changed from between fall and EFT difficulty to between fall and regs difficulty. This post was made before the change.

Iamteehee wrote: ↑Mon Nov 26, 2018 6:06 pm What's the difficulty of the set supposed to be? MUT, SMT and EMT are all 2.0 difficulty by Ophir's difficulty scale but the OP states a difficulty level of 1.5.
Additionally, MUT/SMT/EMT are basically the same difficulty level as EFT, but the set is advertised as between ACF Fall and EFT level.

I'm not super familiar with the dot scale, but this set aims around MUT difficulty.

Is there any update about the date of the Johns Hopkins site of this?

Milhouse wrote: ↑Tue Feb 12, 2019 8:37 pm Is there any update about the date of the Johns Hopkins site of this?

The DC High School date claim thread has had it as 3/30 for a while, but I don't know whether that's for sure confirmed.

I suspect you're as eager as us to find this out, but is there any talk of a new Northeast/New England site to replace the former one at Harvard? Thanks!

_nestorius wrote: ↑Mon Feb 18, 2019 1:12 pm I suspect you're as eager as us to find this out, but is there any talk of a new Northeast/New England site to replace the former one at Harvard? Thanks!

We are currently talking to teams in NE to try to find a new site to replace Harvard and will update everything here as soon as we get any updates.

Is there going to be a forum to discuss this? We were the first mirror, I think, and I have some errata and observations.

tiwonge wrote: ↑Sun Mar 03, 2019 5:05 am Is there going to be a forum to discuss this? We were the first mirror, I think, and I have some errata and observations.

I'll work on this now. For the time being, feel free to email me (etzkornmichael [at] gmail [dot] com).

Done. The easily fixable and important stuff, I e-mailed. For the rest of my feedback, I'll wait for the forum.

Aftere repeated inquiry, we are looking at putting together an online college/open mirror for ILLIAC. I will be posting a date preference poll in the next day or two, will update here.