Question Feedback Request

[AKKOLADE]

Here are the questions that I wrote that appeared... somewhere over the weekend.

Wittenberg, Germany
Tecumseh
Edward I of England
Gustave Flaubert
George W Bush's "Mission Accomplished Speech" (with USS Abraham Lincoln bonus)
Aethelred the Unready (w/ Pope John XV bonus)
Mao Zedong
El Cid bonus
Joe Louis
Eleanor of Aquitaine
Pope Gregory bonus
Slobodan Milosevic
Edict of Nantes
St. Stephen I (w/ Poland bonus)
Things Fall Apart
kings of Jerusalem
Nathaniel Hawthorne bonus
Pittsburgh Steelers (w/ Lynn Swann bonus)
M*A*S*H
Paul Simon
Dick Cheney hunting incident
Nirvana (the band)
The Rolling Stones

Team Rounds:
1968 Democratic National Convention
The Gold Standard
James Madison

[ProfessorIanDuncan]

1968 DNC made me sigh in amazement. i was positive no one would choose it. i was proved wrong. i dont remember hearing all of them but there are definitely some answer lines i enjoy like edict of nantes and ethelred the unready. just from looking at the list the dick cheney hunting thing seems like one of the answer lines that have weird clues in them and can be hard to anticipate as does the mission accomplished speech. although i wasn't a fan of some of the "trash" history tossups on the list, they were very well written.

[Northern Central Railway]

1968 DNC made me sigh in amazement. i was positive no one would choose it. i was proved wrong. i dont remember hearing all of them but there are definitely some answer lines i enjoy like edict of nantes and ethelred the unready. just from looking at the list the dick cheney hunting thing seems like one of the answer lines that have weird clues in them and can be hard to anticipate as does the mission accomplished speech. although i wasn't a fan of some of the "trash" history tossups on the list, they were very well written.

One team told me that they picked the 1968 DNC because they were picking second and they had no idea what Polispeak meant.

[AKKOLADE]

Reading it again, the DNC one should definitely have had a couple of the hard bits made less so. That said, this was a really important moment in history and I feel fine about basing a lightning round on it.

[Scaled Flowerpiercer]

The Nathaniel Hawthorne Bonus was pretty easy because it listed Young Goodman Brown ... though I think it is entirely appropriate to put that work in the bonus part if the answer line is going to be Hawthorne, I thought it was significantly easier than many of the other follow up bonus questions that day, and it was a fairly long bonus prompt for a sentence that ends in Young Goodman Brown.

To be a bit more positive, I liked the Tecumseh tossup and the Madison 60-second round I remember being pretty good, if perhaps it could have been made slightly harder if I remember everything correctly.

I also feel like I didn't hear a lot of these questions, so they might have been in a lot of later playoff rounds.

[AKKOLADE]

I think the Hawthorne one may have been a converted tossup, but I can't swear to that.

Also, looking back, the Cheney tossup was pretty weak. I wish I had done that one differently.

[i never see pigeons in wheeling]

I felt that a Paul Simon tossup may not have been converted enough. Everything else was fine to write on except perhaps the Dick Cheney hunting incident, which I feel was overhyped and should be relegated to the annals of sensationalized media coverage.

[AKKOLADE]

I felt that a Paul Simon tossup may not have been converted enough.

The giveaway to that tossup was, essentially, "recorded with Art Garfunkel." Short of making the giveaway actually be "name rhymes with 'All Climbin'" or "his name is actually Paul Simon," I don't know what could be done to make that particular question more accessible. And I'm not losing sleep over expecting high schoolers to know who Paul Simon is (any more than I did expecting them to know about Marvin Gaye, only this time there was an easy part).

[Stained Diviner]

He had the same name as Senator Paul Simon.

[AKKOLADE]

I've been asked to stop posting in the thread; feel free to still discuss the questions, though. I'll read all the posts.

[saintanthony]

I felt that a Paul Simon tossup may not have been converted enough.

The giveaway to that tossup was, essentially, "recorded with Art Garfunkel."

This tossup led to perhaps my favorite neg in my history of reading quizbowl; a student buzzed after hearing "Bridge Over Troubled Water" and unapologetically answered with "Clay Aiken."