GSAC XVI: December 6, 2008

[Self-incompatibility in plants]

I can say with some confidence that this truly was the best run tournament i have been to so far this year! It was very, very well organized, and everyone involved in running it did an excellent job (Sarah in particular of course), and getting out at a fairly early time was greatly appreciated by us at CR considering we had a 3.5 hour car drive looming ahead of us. Even the moderators, who were not all particularly good readers, were all at least fairly lucid readers who could do most of the pronunciations correctly, which was extremely nice and rare to see. Overall, with the exemption of some issues with the packets and bonuses (which had already been brought up), this tournament was well worth the 17 hour day for CR.

[Down and out in Quintana Roo]

Double Delaware post.

Yep, it was a pretty good day. Yay for volunteering to moderate then not having to moderate then having to almost moderate then not having to moderate. :) Ha, no biggie. For future reference, as weird as this sounds, i really do like moderating and actually prefer it many times than to sitting and watching the team. But i am just glad that everything ran so smoothly from what i saw.

But, Sarah, can you explain this rule to me?

(from the rules given out today) "Answers to bonuses will not be given until the end of the bonus."

Huh? I don't know if i've ever seen this before. And then anyway, we only had two moderators all day who actually stuck to this rule, one of whom changed and stopped doing it after i pointed out that it was, well, actually kinda annoying, and the other who said "it's in the rules" and continued.

It slows down gameplay, and then prevents team members from understanding what the next question is asking about. I can remember a bonus about James Joyce (i think) from Round 3 (i think) where the reader did not identify Joyce as the correct answer after we botched the first clue, then continued "his autobiographical" something or other because the second bonus part didn't have the word "Joyce" in it. How are we supposed to get that? Are teams now further penalized for not getting parts of questions that they're going to have a now more difficult time with the rest? That didn't make a lot of sense to me.

Still, the slowing down gameplay thing was the main reason why it was annoying. A reader we had would go back to the bonus questions and say (after a 0, for example) "the first one, the person who did x and y and lived in z, well that was Smith... and the second one, that thing that he did was..." and it made a not so fun particular match even less fun.

If there's a good defensible reason why only reading the answers after all the bonuses are finished, i'd love to hear it... maybe i'm missing something obvious.

[Lapego1]

If she used the rules/guide from old GSACs, that might explain the rules thing. It was an ancient rule used for most GSACs back in the day (maybe GSAC XIII and earlier).

[Whiter Hydra]

If there's a good defensible reason why only reading the answers after all the bonuses are finished, i'd love to hear it... maybe i'm missing something obvious.

IIRC, the official ACF rules has that as well to stop people from using process of elimination.

[Down and out in Quintana Roo]

If there's a good defensible reason why only reading the answers after all the bonuses are finished, i'd love to hear it... maybe i'm missing something obvious.

IIRC, the official ACF rules has that as well to stop people from using process of elimination.

Well, i suppose that IS a reason, but that still doesn't address my problem about the Joyce bonus. If we were in a room with one of our other moderators, i am assured we would have answered the second bonus part. But, only hearing "his" in our room with with our moderator "following the rules," we had no idea what it was talking about and therefore couldn't get it. Considering our PPB that round was so horrendously low, it wouldn't have made a huge difference, but that's not really the point.

[AlphaQuizBowler]

Chuhern Hwang put up 100 ppg with no negs. Zero negs! How is that possible? I am very impressed.

EDIT: The results post said he had 68 ppg, so I'm guessing the missing State College game brought it down.

[Frater Taciturnus]

If there's a good defensible reason why only reading the answers after all the bonuses are finished, i'd love to hear it... maybe i'm missing something obvious.

IIRC, the official ACF rules has that as well to stop people from using process of elimination.

I direct your attention to ACF Rule F.2

The moderator will rule on the correctness of an answer, and tell what the correct
answer was if the answer given was wrong, after each individual bonus part rather than
at the end of the entire bonus. There is no opportunity for the team which did not answer
the tossup correctly to answer or receive points on the bonus.

[Terrible Shorts Depot]

I felt like they had changed that this year, because I remember getting answers at ACF Fall. I could be wrong. Could an ACF Cabal member clear this up?

[cvdwightw]

Not an ACF Cabal member, but that rule was changed after multiple people, including members of the ACF Cabal, complained about it. You can find a thread complaining about it somewhere in the college archives. When Matt and others rewrote the old ACF rules, they changed this rule. It used to be that correct answers weren't given until the end of the bonus; the post-2007 rules now make things more player-friendly.

[jbarnes112358]

I would certainly be open to changing this rule for future Maggie Walker tournaments, especially since our moderators are not consistently following it anyway. I personally like to reveal answers to bonus parts because it is more conducive to players learning from what they miss, as well as reasons cited above. I do feel that in many cases, however, that revealing answers gives a team a bit of an unfair advantage by allowing them to use a process of elimination to answer instead of answering with the given clues in the question part. Of course, it is possible to structure the bonus where it does not matter which policy is followed. But, I am not sure that we want to put constraints on how we write bonuses just to prevent the process of elimination advantage. One possible way to resolve the dilemma might be to have particular questions prompt the reader at the beginning of the question to not reveal answers if the question writer deems it appropriate.

[Blackboard Monitor Vimes]

Yeah, I used the old GSAC rules. That bit confused me and I forgot to delete it... I thought it probably meant something about waiting until the end of a bonus part to give an answer, which I figured people would ignore anyway. I think we had that discussion last year, too. Sorry about that. I've got the file on my computer; I'm deleting that now.

[Down and out in Quintana Roo]

No, it's alright Sarah, it really wasn't anything egregious. It was just something i hadn't, literally, ever seen before in any format (while i was in high school or in college (well, with my brief quizbowl career at UD)) so it was really just kinda weird.

And i know i have a different perspective about quizbowl than many other people or coaches, but to me, the competitions aren't just about competing, they're for learning, and i honestly don't think my kids are going to learn answers and other knowledge if they're given them after the whole bonus part is finished.

The part about eliminating choices and the fact that giving answers after every portion makes it easier... well, then the questions need to be written better (let's say, for instance, far better than QuAC's bonus questions) so you're not thinking "alright, well i know the three stock answers for this topic, let's throw em out there." I would say that other than a few of yours lacking in the easy/middle/hard pattern that we're used to seeing, 90-95% of the bonus questions we saw yesterday were good... i just want the rules followed consistently across the board so no team is given an advantage or a disadvantage.

Don't let this detract from my original statement... we had a great time yesterday and it was well worth the trip. :) We hope to see a lot of you at Charter in a couple weeks, but it looks like it's going to be a lot more northern teams instead.

[intothenegs]

Chuhern Hwang put up 100 ppg with no negs. Zero negs! How is that possible? I am very impressed.

EDIT: The results post said he had 68 ppg, so I'm guessing the missing State College game brought it down.

I think it was 88 ppg? I remember scoring 4 tossups that round with no negs, and 68 ppg would have meant I had 12 negs that round .

[Blackboard Monitor Vimes]

Chuhern Hwang put up 100 ppg with no negs. Zero negs! How is that possible? I am very impressed.

EDIT: The results post said he had 68 ppg, so I'm guessing the missing State College game brought it down.

I think it was 88 ppg? I remember scoring 4 tossups that round with no negs, and 68 ppg would have meant I had 12 negs that round .

Something very bizarre happened here. The State College game had to have been entered because they were missing the results of the GDS game but nothing else when we were trying to make the play-off schedule. We then fixed that but the individual stats for James Monroe still weren't right...I have no idea what happened, really. Ted (my stats guy) went back through and was correcting inconsistencies in individual stats, since several people evidently can't count, and I suppose he might have accidentally deleted that game. His computer showed Chuhern at 90 ppg. Like I said, I have the scoresheets in a drawer and I suppose I could edit the stats again...but that would take a while to do and if you guys don't mind, I'd rather not. I can post the stats from that game here, though, if I find the scoresheet. Also, I discovered before I left that the half-packet scores didn't get entered and took those scoresheets home, so here they are:

State College A 35, Walter Johnson 225
Dorman A 70, Walter Johnson 240

[Blackboard Monitor Vimes]

GDS, WJ, TJ A, and Dorman A qualify for the PACE NSC, if I hadn't mentioned that before...

[jbarnes112358]

I actually have the missing scoresheet with me as I decided to bring them home to organize and to peruse, the the old school paper lover that I am.

Round 4: State College A 450 - James Monroe 200

SC-A: Blackbird 10, Bennie 75, B-52 -5, Super Fortress 40 ....SC-A bonus conversion = 330/13 = 25.385
JM: Bryan 10, Katrina 0, Chuhern 50, Paul 0....JM bonus conversion = 140/6 = 23.333

Hopefully we will be able to fix the official record soon.

[AlphaQuizBowler]

Chuhern Hwang put up 100 ppg with no negs. Zero negs! How is that possible? I am very impressed.

EDIT: The results post said he had 68 ppg, so I'm guessing the missing State College game brought it down.

I think it was 88 ppg? I remember scoring 4 tossups that round with no negs, and 68 ppg would have meant I had 12 negs that round .

But how do you not neg once in a tournament and still score that many points?

[Tower Monarch]

Following Cosby A yesterday proved to me the need for a solution to the whole top teams-average teams stratification in high school quizbowl: namely, the obvious response of decreasing bonus difficulty and TU answer choice to help average teams get tossups at the end and have PPBs of at least 6 or 7 would sadly result in a limited ability to distinguish top teams (increasing the average bonus points received by the necessary 5 would've pushed Dorman A and others to that 30 limit, which would draw criticism of "too easy"). Two common proposals for correction have come to my ears: two sets of packets (basically two tournaments), which would most likely have proven impossible for Maggie Walker this year in terms of writing/editing, or creating greater separation among part difficulty (easier "1st" parts and harder "3rd" ones), which was generally put into practice with this set.In any overall criticism of this tournament's questions, I hope people acknowledge these issues.
In terms of actual problems, my largest issue was the end distribution, which apparently lost importance when it came to playoff rounds with 1/x bio and 1/x math to count as the Science TU category and a final with 1/0 anthropology, 0/2 philosophy and 0/1 mythology comprising the finals' RMP category... Having penned the original planned distribution and having written around 45/42 for this tournament in rough adherence to it, this was somewhat disappointed. As I plan to write for next year's GSAC and help MW solve these types of problems this year, I would like to hear how many of these general writer/editor problems were noticeable in the final product. As for difficulty fluctuation, no one can say for sure what the "proper" level is, and only the ideal 2-3 months of play-testing of editing that has been found impossible could really entirely correct this. Again, I would like players to note if and when this answer does not seem sufficient. As for me, I will lay claim to having written some of the "hardest" questions in this set (including the Rameau bonus, Dees), I will analyze the distribution when the questions get posted, I will apologize for this tome of a post, and I will openly resent the early comment that the quality has decreased from last year (difficulty increased- yes, but with it, answer choice and bonus clues, if not difficulty, improved). Having seen from many angles Governor's School's last three tournaments (including HAVOC, not necessarily Mehdi's GSAC), this was definitely better organized and probably contained a higher quality set than the other two.

[Blackboard Monitor Vimes]

Thanks for the comments, Cameron. Unfortunately, due to the science not getting finished until Wednesday or so, I had no time to look over the final answer matrix. I definitely don't remember one round only having two science questions when I finished the answer matrix, so I think that may have been the unintended consequence of some bad questions being removed Friday night with others being shuffled around. Someone mentioned to me the existence of an Excel program that will arrange answers digitally. I hope to learn how to do this, which should fix that problem. Either that, or I will designate someone with no other pressing responsibilities to go through the answer matrix and count. I sincerely hope it did not affect the outcome of any games.

As for question quality, I have to agree completely with Cameron. I saw very few of the science questions, so I can't speak for those and will admit to hearing that some were terrible, but I know the lit at least had to have been better than GSAC XV because I had no editing experience when I was responsible for that, whereas I'm at least a mostly-competent lit editor now. The same goes for the other areas for which I was responsible (everything but science, math theory, history, geo, and govt). GSACs XV and XVI will be sent to Chris Carter when I get home from practice tomorrow, so I guess people will then be able to see for themselves if they think there's a substantial difference.

[intothenegs]

Chuhern Hwang put up 100 ppg with no negs. Zero negs! How is that possible? I am very impressed.

EDIT: The results post said he had 68 ppg, so I'm guessing the missing State College game brought it down.

I think it was 88 ppg? I remember scoring 4 tossups that round with no negs, and 68 ppg would have meant I had 12 negs that round .

But how do you not neg once in a tournament and still score that many points?

I usually try not to neg too much, so I suppose I was having a good morning and just didn't get any.

[Lapego1]

I meant to post this sooner, but if you indeed finished by 5 (going off when final results were posted), this would've been probably one of the better run GSACs I've seen. I know my year we finished about 5:45 (10 rounds) with a slight delay after rd 7 due to SQBS crashing and us having to re-enter all the scoresheets during lunch. Before that it was generally between 5:30 and 7:00 that things finished. It sounds like this card system is the way to go and should be used in the future whenever possible. Good job, Sarah!

[Blackboard Monitor Vimes]

I meant to post this sooner, but if you indeed finished by 5 (going off when final results were posted), this would've been probably one of the better run GSACs I've seen. I know my year we finished about 5:45 (10 rounds) with a slight delay after rd 7 due to SQBS crashing and us having to re-enter all the scoresheets during lunch. Before that it was generally between 5:30 and 7:00 that things finished. It sounds like this card system is the way to go and should be used in the future whenever possible. Good job, Sarah!

Thanks, Mehdi. I posted stats after room clean-up was almost done, and it took me a little while to figure out how to do it (even with some assistance from Matt), so we actually ended a little earlier than that. As my first director, a "good job" from you means a lot to me.

Also, I'm not sure I said this before, but thanks a lot to Mr. Tressler for having those card schedules freely available online. That was a huge help.

[jbarnes112358]

Yes, the card system worked beautifully, especially with 32 teams (and 16 in the consolation bracket). It works especially nicely for powers of two, appealing to my mathematical sensibilities of order and symmetry. Also, having the schedule on the card made it easy to see where you are supposed to play your next game without trying to follow some complicated schedule card as was the case in previous GSAC's. Teams also seemed to enjoy playing teams with identical records making for more competitive games. If using the card system, caution is in order to make sure a mistake is not made in setting things up, as an error would mess up the system, which may be difficult to rectify on the fly. I will reiterate Sarah's appreciation for Matt Weiner's help in setting up the system. Thanks also to those who suggested this system to us.

If I could do this tournament over, I would think twice about having all teams play all the way to the finals. The difficulty level of the finals was a big jump from the other rounds. There was little to be gained by many of those teams playing that round. The top teams seemed to be mostly satisfied with the difficulty level of that round, however. I believe the finals sort of became the repository of some of the questions we deemed too hard for the rest of the rounds. But, in spite of what was said about the distribution of the final packet, in toto it was not too far away from our target distribution by my reckoning, though it was not perfect in that regard. One reason the distribution seemed off might have been that most of the bonuses went unheard by most teams outside the top tier.

[Robbie Ram]

Thanks Sarah, Dr. Barnes, & Co., for a well-run and enjoyable tournament! I only wish we had gotten to play Charlottesville, Dorman B, & TJ B so we could see if we really deserved the #8 spot; based on both the prelim round statistics— and on how we just got absolutely smashed by every team we played in the playoffs (State College A, Dorman A, Walter Johnson, & also James Monroe)— I suspect the #9 - #11 teams all would have beaten us had we played against them in either the prelims or the playoffs.

We knew our short-handed team (with 1 rookie and two of our top 4 players missing) was probably no match for any of the top 6 teams even if we had been at full strength, but by the end of the tournament we honestly just felt badly for finishing as high as #8 considering how we just got totally embarassed in that last four rounds. We liked the card system in general, but we also wondered how we could have gone 4-1 in the preliminaries and a great team like WJ only went 3-2. Something seems fishy about that somehow.

Still, we were glad for the opportunity to get to see such fantastic teams in action, and we will join in with the congratulations to GDS (who we didn't get to play) for knocking off all the other juggernaut teams at the top of the field!

[Blackboard Monitor Vimes]

So several issues with stats were brought to my attention, including a mysterious incident of one game disappearing, as it was there when we made the play-off schedules. Anyway, here's the full, corrected stats (I hope). I'm not sure SQBS liked the half-rounds; we'll see.

[Captain Sinico]

...I would like to cite as being problematic...
2. The Arnolfini Wedding came up for the 1x10^7th time.

This isn't problematic.

MaS

[closesesame]

I hate to make life too difficult for you, Sarah, but isn't an entire round missing from these full stats?

[Blackboard Monitor Vimes]

I hate to make life too difficult for you, Sarah, but isn't an entire round missing from these full stats?

Please tell me you're kidding me? If Dorman, WJ, and State College look like they have an extra round, it's because I threw the tiebreaker stats in there. I wasn't sure how SQBS would deal with that...I'll look at it and see.

[Blackboard Monitor Vimes]

Upon glancing at it, it's not a full round, as some have 9 and some that were in the tiebreaker mysteriously have 11. More games do appear to have vanished, though. I have no idea what happened. I think something got overwritten somewhere or something...

[closesesame]

We played a game versus GDS in Round 8 that resulted in a 240-325 loss. That game seems to be missing, and it would give both of our teams an additional game to make our wins and losses add to 9. That got me wondering whether or not games were missing for other teams as well.

[TheKingInYellow]

Yeah, State College is listed as having played James Monroe twice, I can assure you that didn't happen. I'm not sure how half packets work in determining games played, but it seems like that might affect stats.

[Blackboard Monitor Vimes]

Someone tried to tell me that the State College-James Monroe game was missing, so I entered it today and thought I deleted a second one that I found...earliest I'll be able to deal with this is Wednesday. If anyone else spots something odd, please let me know by then.

Also, packets from this year and last year have now been sent to Chris Carter.

[cdcarter]

http://quizbowlpackets.com/archive/gsacxvi.zip
http://quizbowlpackets.com/archive/gsacxv.zip

Enjoy!

[ClemsonQB]

I only looked at two random packets, but a major problem I saw was the altogether lack of giveaway clues in a couple of questions. Specifically Brueghel, Axum and Six Day War.

[closesesame]

It's strange you say that, George, because for that Axum tossup I actually thought "the language was Ge'ez" was a giveaway in the first line. I would not have buzzed as early as I did (i.e. after the first line) on that question if the subsequent history had come first, but there's pretty much only one place in the world that spoke Ge'ez. Some of the clues in the Six-Day War tossup were stock clues, like the USS Liberty incident.

[ClemsonQB]

It's strange you say that, George, because for that Axum tossup I actually thought "the language was Ge'ez" was a giveaway in the first line. I would not have buzzed as early as I did (i.e. after the first line) on that question if the subsequent history had come first, but there's pretty much only one place in the world that spoke Ge'ez. Some of the clues in the Six-Day War tossup were stock clues, like the USS Liberty incident.

Sure, Ge'ez was certainly misplaced, but its not a giveaway clue in high school.

[closesesame]

I can see your point (and Phil Graves agrees with you). There's not much of a way to do a giveaway about something like Axum other than "ancient Ethiopian trading empire", but that said, it's not an unreasonable question to ask given the field. I think most of the questions, especially in the prelims, were sufficiently easy by the end to be answered by most teams. The playoff rounds, especially the final round, were more difficult, and rightly so.

[ClemsonQB]

That's exactly my complaint, there is no mention of "Ethiopia" in the tossup.

[closesesame]

Ah.

[Blackboard Monitor Vimes]

That's exactly my complaint, there is no mention of "Ethiopia" in the tossup.

Whoa, seriously? Which round was that in, so that I may go look? Evidently we never got to peer-edit that one; I wasn't aware that there was history we didn't get to.

[at your pleasure]

I remember buzzer-racing Brugel on Tower of Babel. That said, I think Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is well-known enough to be a givaway. It's very well-known(I vaugely remeber it being tossed up at one of Centennial's tournaments), and I would guess that a lot of teams would know it from the W.H. Auden poem.
As for the Six-Day-War tossup, the giveaway could also describe the Yom Kippur war, which Nasser also fought in. However, "Sinai Penninsula" should be gettable by the desired chunk of the field, since that was the largest territorial gain in tha war. That said, I don't think it would have been too big an issue to replace the aforementioned non-specific giveaway with a clue on the west bank/gaza.
Also, "They belived in an oral law" comes too early in the Pharisee question, since that was their main distinguishing characteristic.

[Blackboard Monitor Vimes]

The only one of those for which I was responsible was Brueghel. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus was a toss-up last season; I heard it at TJ; I don't recall if it was an IS set or their housewritten tournament. Nevertheless, that question may have been an example of me not knowing what people know. I believe I left out any mention of the rest of his family, but what else do people know about him?

The other questions mentioned so far were edited by Greg; I'll see if I can't get him to offer an opinion beyond my surprise that not all the history got peer-edited (there's no way I would have let Tito omit Ethiopia from the Axum giveaway, although I am curious as to what it actually was), as I really thought we finished it.

[ClemsonQB]

That's exactly my complaint, there is no mention of "Ethiopia" in the tossup.

Whoa, seriously? Which round was that in, so that I may go look? Evidently we never got to peer-edit that one; I wasn't aware that there was history we didn't get to.

5th round.

[ClemsonQB]

"Growing up" outside the DC region, The Peasant Wedding and Hunters in the Snow were definitely the most famous Brueghel works.

[Blackboard Monitor Vimes]

That's exactly my complaint, there is no mention of "Ethiopia" in the tossup.

Whoa, seriously? Which round was that in, so that I may go look? Evidently we never got to peer-edit that one; I wasn't aware that there was history we didn't get to.

5th round.

Well, Meroe and stelae are taught in school, at least around here, and saying that it's an African civilization on the Red Sea puts it in that general Egypt-Sudan-Ethiopia area, and it clearly wasn't Egypt. I actually don't see too much of a problem with that. If people know that Axum was in Ethiopia, I think they should probably know that that general area is on the Red Sea.

[The Laughing Man]

I think that the Breughel giveaway Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is perfectly reasonable, it's probably his most famous work. Maybe Breughel wouldn't be converted in as many rooms as it should be, but I think that toss up conversion is overrated. Obviously, the point of pyramidal questions is that everyone can play on them, but if you can't even toss up any answer as obscure as Breughel in the preliminaries, the answer space consists of 10 artists or something. My view is that for the less experienced teams, the most important thing is not who wins (because really, does it matter if a team comes in 27th or 29th) but whether the teams are learning. I do not think that expanding the preliminary canon a bit would really impede this learning. I definitely understand why people want to have heard answers; I love college questions, but reading say C.O. science questions would not be so interesting. Still, in general the high school preliminaries canon is ridiculously small, especially if the tournament is running a card system where two top teams can meet.

[Blackboard Monitor Vimes]

"Growing up" outside the DC region, The Peasant Wedding and Hunters in the Snow were definitely the most famous Brueghel works.

I have never heard of Hunters in the Snow. I agree that Peasant Wedding probably should have been in there, but Netherlandish Proverbs was. How many Netherlandish Renaissance artists do you know, honestly?

[ClemsonQB]

That's exactly my complaint, there is no mention of "Ethiopia" in the tossup.

Whoa, seriously? Which round was that in, so that I may go look? Evidently we never got to peer-edit that one; I wasn't aware that there was history we didn't get to.

5th round.

Well, Meroe and stelae are taught in school, at least around here, and saying that it's an African civilization on the Red Sea puts it in that general Egypt-Sudan-Ethiopia area, and it clearly wasn't Egypt. I actually don't see too much of a problem with that. If people know that Axum was in Ethiopia, I think they should probably know that that general area is on the Red Sea.

Doesn't Kush apply to that as well, at least the geography.

[closesesame]

Hunters in the Snow is a stock giveaway.

[at your pleasure]

"Growing up" outside the DC region, The Peasant Wedding and Hunters in the Snow were definitely the most famous Brueghel works.

True, but that doesn't mean that Landscape with the fall of Icarus is unsuitable as a giveaway. Looking back at the tossup, it does seem like those two works could have been included, but I doubt not having them reduced conversion significantly. Besides, if somthing is tossupable, it's probably a suitable givaway.