How to prepare for College Nationals

[Shahar S.]

As many of you may remember, a while ago the forums exploded with a huge discussion on the difficulty of college nationals. However, while that discussion fostered many arguments for why national competitions have the difficulty they do, very little was actually spent discussing what actually distinguishes studying for college nationals from the rest of quizbowl.

The main thing I've noticed while trying (and largely failing) to adjust to the difficulty is that packet study does very little to improve your skill level at nats in comparison to a lower level of play. This can cause many experienced high school players who are new to college quizbowl to see nats as daunting. I don't mean to say that as a criticism, but I believe it is true, especially considering that there's no "higher level" to study that you would be able to reference.

Clearly, success is not impossible at this level, so there is some method to the madness. That being said, it remains elusive for a large majority of people even amongst experienced college players. Tips like "write questions" and "read textbooks" are great, but they often fail to specify how exactly they can help a player to improve where other strategies fail. I believe a more thorough discussion on what tactics work and, more importantly, why they work at a national level is in order.

I'm under the impression that certain ways of implementing these tips (i.e. writing questions primarily by drawing from existing questions in the database) does not garner results that are meaningful in the long run. Hopefully more discussion on the direct benefit of these strategies can point people to the "correct" way of implementing them. I'm looking forward to the community's response!

[Shahar S.]

It has been brought to my attention this would fit better elsewhere on the forums. If a moderator could please move this to the "collegiate discussion" subthread, that would be much appreciated.

Done --Mgmt.

[Good Goblin Housekeeping]

For lack of a less tautological way of explaining it, you study for nationals by learning things that are likely to come up at nationals. Nats can be really hard! But to be honest, a team that can consistently snipe every tossup (but like, the stupid hard ones too) pre-FTP is probably able to consistently make it to the top bracket or the top of the lower bracket of ACF Nats.

That being said, it's kind of hard to verbalize it more than, writing questions and reading textbooks can be used along with judgment on the kinds of things that have been asked before and a general "sense" of how qb stuff is asked. Similarly there's value in looking at packets or books and asking "does this seem like a plausible tu answerline or bonus part at nats?" -- this can similarly be used for like articles and textbooks. Of course it helps if you're interest in the subject matter, otherwise you're basically soullessly farming for clues - that being said writing a lot is super helpful for getting into the mindset of what to look up for nats, since you're both fishing through sources and trying to figure out what clues are good to have :)

Unfortunately there isn't like a magical quick fix to get a perfect idea of what's going come up but hopefully my scattered paragraph has been slightly helpful

[ryanrosenberg]

There are a couple of general tracks to studying for hard college and open tournaments. Because I'm a data scientist, I'll call them supervised learning and unsupervised learning. These don't actually correspond to the machine learning categories but they're a cute way to divide it up.

Supervised learning aims to learn by studying what has come up before. You read a lot of packets of past hard sets, look everything up, read relevant books, take notes, card for better retention if you want. If you haven't played many hard things before, this is a time-efficient way of getting better; even at the highest levels things will repeat and you'll find benefits from packet study. This is essentially the method Wang describes, and done enough it will make you competitive at local tournaments and give you a nice shot at top bracket of national tournaments.

Unsupervised learning, by contrast, generally attempts to learn things without much regard to quizbowl notoriety. The methods of learning things don't have to be different than supervised learning: reading, taking notes, carding will all still help you retain things. However, the way you generate what you study relies more on textbooks, lay histories, reading for fun, journal articles, class notes, etc. than packet study. This method is much less efficient, but you'll get a few sick buzzes a tournament and maybe pull off a huge upset here or there.

This is not a rigid dichotomy. The best players do plenty of both of these types of learning. But if you're looking for "where do I start," think about which of these studying strategies appeals more to you and go after it. You can always supplement your cool hyperreal lit knowledge with some packet study to fill in gaps, or develop a specialty in, say, econ in addition to being a competent generalist.

[Tejas]

It seems like you're on the right track when it comes to studying, basically any method of learning clues can be effective as long as you're learning relevant things that could potentially come up and are able to retain that knowledge. Of course, that improvement may not be apparent quickly but if you keep up studying for a longer period of time you'll see improvements by the time Nats comes around. There is no simple trick or alternate method to getting good, it really just takes time and effort.

There were a couple things that helped me build up confidence for playing at higher levels. One is simply looking up questions on subjects you've studied recently, obviously you'll find that you can answer these questions earlier or convert more bonus parts than you would have before studying. Another is listening to recordings or videos of past games, I think that when you read through a packet the number of difficult clues and answerlines can seem intimidating but when you see that even the best players frequently don't buzz until well into a question, it can feel a bit more manageable.

[Smuttynose Island]

Complementing Ryan, Andrew, and Tejas' excellent "high level" posts on studying for Nats-level quizbowl, I'd like to share my own approach to studying Visual Arts.

When I'm actively studying, I like to take a "textbook+" approach to studying visual arts. Each "week", I try to read 10-20ish pages from an art history book. Every unique "fact" from that book gets turned into a notecard. Each major artist or art work discussed in the book gets looked up on quizdb and the reoccurring clues all get turned into notecards. If I'm particularly interested in a piece or artist, I'll dig into their Wikipedia page, ArtStory entry, or museum writeups. This study method is quite intensive and its certainly not the most efficient, but it works for me.

I like this approach for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, it exposes me to a lot of artists, artworks, and ideas that I otherwise would never have been exposed to. It also does a great job striking a balance between depth and breadth*. There are lots of unmined clues on artists and artworks that appear in textbooks and on the internet. By mining these sources, you can generate a good number of early buzzes on questions. Textbooks and more specialized art history books are also chockful of secondary and tertiary artists who come up in high level quizbowl every once and awhile. Studying from these books is therefore a very efficient way to learn about them.

*Like Andrew said, there is an incredible utility to having a wide breadth of knowledge at the ACF Nationals level. There's almost always going to be a couple of "upper level canon" answerlines per packet. Just knowing a handful of clues about these "hard" answerlines gives you a competitive advantage over most of the teams in the field.

[Zealots of Stockholm]

I'm not the most qualified to talk about studying for nats, so I'll just assume the advice given by the other very talented players in this thread is good.

I did want to address a similar topic regarding transitioning from high school to college quizbowl (and nationals): mindset/expectations. A common theme I have noticed during my time in undergrad is that posts asking for advice about transitioning to collegiate quizbowl (and specifically nats), which often seem inspired by frustration (not this post in particular, just a trend I've noticed), often come from players who were nationally elite in high school, or at least on a nationally competitive team. One of the most important things to do when making this transition is to evaluate your mindset regarding college quizbowl and set reasonable expectations. Even if you were among the best players nationally in high school, you are new to the college game and will probably struggle initially, at least with difficulties above ACF Regionals (and possibly including regionals). And that's totally okay! Very rarely do new high school players dominate nationals in their first year, and nobody seems to be surprised by this fact. It will take time to reach the top levels of the collegiate game, so not expecting yourself to be the lead scorer on a top bracket team right away can help make your time in collegiate quizbowl more enjoyable.

[CaseyB]

To echo Chandler's post about mindset, I agree that your expectations about what Nats will be like play a big role in the type of experience you have at Nats. Some of this is having reasonable expectations for where you will finish, which is true at any tournament. At Nats in particular, another mental aspect is to be prepared for the much harder questions that you're going to encounter. The more Nats packets you hear in practice, the more comfortable you will be with that level of question when you get to the actual tournament. They will still be really difficult questions, but you'll be more ready to hear those questions in competition because you've heard a bunch like them in practice.

I also agree that there is, and should be, a big jump between high school regular difficulty and college regular difficulty, and recognizing this will help with having a positive mentality in adjusting to the college game.

[Shahar S.]

To echo off of Chandler and Casey's posts a bit, I think the reason there is frustration among strong high school players has less to do with "I'm not good enough" and more to do with "I don't know how to become good enough" if that makes sense. Both of you make valid points about expectations, but I don't think we need to rehash that in here. We've already had a solid 130 posts dedicated to this subject in the "College Nationals and Its Problems" thread. Not that the points you're making aren't valuable, but the goal of this thread is to talk about concrete methods of improvement, not necessarily why achieving that improvement may be a frustrating process.

There's already been some really excellent advice given on this thread that I'm glad got put in the open (the assertion that what Ryan calls "unsupervised learning" is actually supposed to be somewhat inefficient has been particularly enlightening). Now that we've discussed general mindset, I think a valuable place to take the conversation would be to talk about sources of information. If we're going in with the mindset of "I need to keep my eyes out for potential question material," where should we be looking for that?

There are things like class notes, articles, and textbooks that have already been mentioned above, but without really distinguishing how each would be used, and if the way they're being used differs by the category being studied. What differences exist in the ways to get exposed to more potential answerlines between categories. Obviously the sources you would look at would be different for each, but I think it's worth talking about which source works better for which category and why.

[ThisIsMyUsername]

I have to admit that I'm puzzled by one of the premises of this thread: that studying for nationals is somehow different than studying for any other difficulty level. I haven't found that to be the case in the categories in which I specialize (Arts, Lit, and Thought). That is, when I was just starting out in quizbowl, I studied for harder tournaments exactly the same way that I studied for easier tournaments.

What may create the illusion that the same studying methods are ineffective is that one's studying is rewarded less reliably. For example, if I decide to read an anthology of Kafka stories or look at murals by Diego Rivera, I am essentially guaranteed to have that knowledge rewarded within a year. However, if I choose instead to read an anthology of Kleist stories or look at murals by Orozco, I may not have that knowledge rewarded within a year, both because there are fewer hard tournaments and because the canon is larger at higher difficulties, thus lowering the chance that any particular topic is going to come up.

All of this can cause you to go "Geez, I studied all of this stuff and it did me no good." Well, it didn't come up this time. But if you chose well (that is, according to some mixture of the quizbowl canon and the real-world canon), it will. Studying higher-difficulty material is often playing the long game. And thus I wouldn't take slow progress as necessarily a sign that you're doing things wrong. The real signs that your studying methods might be off-base are if you're looking through Nats packets and consistently finding answers that you don't think could have been predicted at all, or if you're spending tons of time learning things that have never come up before in any shape or form (which is probably inefficient).