Not to me, since the ease of memorizing minor works compared to learning about major works will prove very attractive to more than a few players. Can't you just give a clue or two about the book before you give the title?1. Is it ever ok to use the title of a minor work as a leadin clue, or should we assume that most teams will have at least one player who has memorized the listed works of all canonically-tossupable answers? (I would suggest that while the example above might be a mediocre question, it's not a bad question. A bad question is "This author of ~The World as Will and Idea~...")
Mabye not, but editors and writers can certainly take pains to avoid them(and they should be far rarer than they are on NAQT questions) by avoiding transparency, stock clues, misplaced clues, and the like.Is it possible to entirely eliminate the buzzer race? My belief has always been: no, sometimes two teams will happen to know the same clue at the same time.
A tendency I've seen in recent question criticism (this is also true of the "high school bonus difficulty and team sorting" thread) is to focus in on the flaws of individual questions as perfect sorting mechanisms, and I think at some point this misses the forest for the trees.
Well, part of this is because the sets critiqued are overall of such quality that people feel that only a few questions need dissection. In addition, the overall quality of the set makes the few clunkers stand out even more.
So use a clue on "X called this guy's theory of Y in book Z" or "he argued for X in work Y'. Or just write questions on works.Observationally, I think the underlying tension here is that it is more difficult to write uniquely identifying clues based on the substantive contents of works (here: of the various other people who have opposed German metaphysics over the years, how many of them hated Hegel?).