HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by Maury Island incident »

Dr. Loki Skylizard, Thoracic Surgeon wrote:
Dr. Loki Skylizard, Thoracic Surgeon wrote:
UlyssesInvictus wrote:That said, please stop trying to associate Harvard with Harvard QB. If you have an issue with the club, don't let your stereotypes about the university as a whole taint your other arguments (especially since you have a reasonable amount of other evidence below).
raynor plz
I'd encourage future participants to make sure they're properly distinguishing the target of their criticism between Harvard's quiz bowl team, Harvard University, Harvard Square, the MBTA station at Harvard, Jeremy Lin, John Harvard, "Harvard" Eddie Grant, current Lieutenant Governor of Manitoba John Harvard, Havarti cheese, Harvard Bridge, the Harvard Crimson, the Alabama Crimson Tide, the city of Harvard located in Nebraska, the Harvard Mark I, Mark I. Fox, Harvard-Westlake School, and Dartmouth. Failure to do so will lead to confusion as to who is actually being criticized in a thread about the Harvard Fall Tournament.
Don't forget the town of Harvard, Massachusetts!
Last edited by Maury Island incident on Mon Nov 17, 2014 6:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by UlyssesInvictus »

Dr. Loki Skylizard, Thoracic Surgeon wrote:
Dr. Loki Skylizard, Thoracic Surgeon wrote:
UlyssesInvictus wrote:That said, please stop trying to associate Harvard with Harvard QB. If you have an issue with the club, don't let your stereotypes about the university as a whole taint your other arguments (especially since you have a reasonable amount of other evidence below).
raynor plz
I'd encourage future participants to make sure they're properly distinguishing the target of their criticism between Harvard's quiz bowl team, Harvard University, Harvard Square, the MBTA station at Harvard, Jeremy Lin, John Harvard, "Harvard" Eddie Grant, current Lieutenant Governor of Manitoba John Harvard, Havarti cheese, Harvard Bridge, the Harvard Crimson, the Alabama Crimson Tide, the city of Harvard located in Nebraska, the Harvard Mark I, Mark I. Fox, Harvard-Westlake School, and Dartmouth. Failure to do so will lead to confusion as to who is actually being criticized in a thread about the Harvard Fall Tournament.
Okay, okay, I get it, I said something really dumb...
quadrisecant wrote:Don't forget the town of Harvard, Massachusetts!
A tourist once asked me where the city of Harvard was, so don't make too much fun of this.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by fett0001 »

I'm confused as to why one person didn't have all the scoresheets in their possession at the end of the tournament.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by hydrocephalitic listlessness »

Ben took most, but not all, of the scoresheets from the matches that took place in the Yard with him back to Columbia when he had to leave before the tournament finished (I've got the rest of those). Raynor has the scoresheets from the SOCH because we couldn't use a runner from the SOCH to the Yard, and he didn't get back to the Yard until well after Ben left. He and I will be sending the stats from those sheets to Ben, who should be posting stats soonish.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by Halved Xenon Stinging »

I really hope that I am not "telling people how to post" here, but can we tone it down on the attacks on members of the Harvard team? Most, if not all of the criticisms in this thread have been from people who were not actually at the tournament. The few interruptions did not detriment from my tournament experience at all, and from speaking to members of my and other teams, most players feel the same way as I do.

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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by Cheynem »

I'm afraid, mon frere, that is exactly what "telling other people how to post" means.

Look, I don't think for the most part, people really have personal stakes in ripping on Harvard; it's just that HFT because of the name and the cachet has become a fairly prestigious annual housewrite, but it seems like each year there is rampart discussion about either its difficulty or tournament direction/logistics. I don't think it's out of bounds to discuss that regardless if you were present or not present. I'm sure you and your team enjoyed it and that's great, but did every team? Good quizbowl is about making sure good quizbowl is happening all over.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by jonpin »

hydrocephalitic listlessness wrote:Ben took most, but not all, of the scoresheets from the matches that took place in the Yard with him back to Columbia when he had to leave before the tournament finished (I've got the rest of those). Raynor has the scoresheets from the SOCH because we couldn't use a runner from the SOCH to the Yard, and he didn't get back to the Yard until well after Ben left. He and I will be sending the stats from those sheets to Ben, who should be posting stats soonish.
Traditionally, after-the-fact stats cleanup and results posting is the responsibility of the people running the tournament, not the volunteer mercenary who traveled four hours each way to help out.
Shangdevin wrote:I really hope that I am not "telling people how to post" here, but can we tone it down on the attacks on members of the Harvard team? Most, if not all of the criticisms in this thread have been from people who were not actually at the tournament. The few interruptions did not detriment from my tournament experience at all, and from speaking to members of my and other teams, most players feel the same way as I do.
I don't think many of the posters (present in Cambridge or not) are intending to insult every member of the Harvard team, but I think a reasonable thing to ask would be that the Harvard team make a sober assessment--not just of what went wrong, because crap happens to everyone--but of how to make sure it doesn't happen next year and the year after and the year after.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by Matt Weiner »

So, here we are for the Nth straight year with this. Some points to consider:

The reason tournaments should run on time is not because top teams care. Top teams have a dedication to playing hard questions against high-quality opponents and an expectation that their entire Saturdays will be blocked off for quizbowl pretty much every week. If we ever want to expand quizbowl beyond top teams, we have to worry about running our tournaments properly.

It's very sad that players on highly active teams who have played dozens of tournaments think that the events of HFT, not limited to extending past 6 PM to run 10 rounds, are acceptable or evidence of a "well run" event. This indicates to me that far too many tournaments in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic are still run very poorly, to the extent that this is considered the norm. If everyone in the U.S. truly thought this was acceptable, then we would have no problem -- we would just continue to run tournaments this way and it would be a lot easier to expand quizbowl because we would not have to worry about proper TD or staff performance. Unfortunately, there is a huge selection bias in play. Most people do NOT think this is acceptable, and when they learn that this is just the way quizbowl is, they stop participating. The incorrect conclusion to draw from this is "everyone I talk to thinks this is great, there's no problem." The correct conclusion is "we continue to drive people off year after year with this behavior until only those who don't care remain, and it needs to stop."

Out of experienced quizbowl teams, the HFT field is self-selected among people who know what they are getting -- questions that wouldn't be considered appropriate for a high school national, minimal to no effort put into planning the logistics, a closed loop of "people who think this is acceptable" attending the tournament and then announcing they found the tournament acceptable. As always, teams have the right to attend what they want and hosts have the right to offer what they want, and no one has either the interest or power to change either of those facts, but we will continue to make observations about what is good for quizbowl as a whole. I do not think the fact that a disturbing number of non-elite teams attend HFT and then never play quizbowl again because they think this is what every tournament is like is a good thing for quizbowl as a whole. I do not think that pushing mirrors of this tournament on local tournaments that do not attract a nationals-caliber field like the main site does is good for quizbowl as a whole. I do not think the Harvard team's oft-stated belief that accessible, properly run high school quizbowl is "illegitimate" and that teams outside of the 30 or so who have the interest and funding to travel to Harvard can go screw themselves is good for quizbowl as a whole. I do not think that schools banking on their institutional prestige to continue hosting subpar high school tournaments is good for quizbowl as a whole. I long ago gave up on arguing these things with you because you demonstrated the same attitude emerging in this thread, where the objections of people outside the Ivy League to any Harvard behavior are considered, at best, an opportunity to amuse yourselves by posting inflammatory crap and them immediately denying it when someone posts a counter-argument.

There is absolutely no way that any school besides Harvard could get away with repeatedly running a tournament like HFT. I urge you to keep this in mind when attempting, in the future, to shut down criticism with irrelevant "Harvard is not Harvard quizbowl" posts. If it were not for the reputation of your university giving people the erroneous impression that Harvard is "one of the epicenters of college QB" because "smart people go to Harvard" in the popular consciousness, then you would be pilloried for the wildly too-difficult set that you write (EVERY year), your inability to keep the tournament running on time (EVERY year), the fact that you run a 36-team event despite having no access to a building with 18 rooms in it and far from enough people to even put 1 competent staffer in each room (EVERY year), and your contemptuous, destructive attitude towards the rest of quizbowl that is trotted out whenever someone fails to realize the futility of addressing all of this and criticizes you (EVERY year). If a tournament without the benefit of the Ivy League halo were run like this, on these questions, at VCU, or Michigan State, or Kentucky, the thread would descend into chaos and there would be no hope of hosting another tournament, because teams would be pissed off and vow never to return. Compare the fallout to any other tournament running this late or using questions this inappropriate -- people leave the tournament, get angry about it, and certainly don't APOLOGIZE to the host for being upset or make plans to attend again the following year. The only reason your tournament has not been burned down by an angry mob is because of what the Harvard name means to people outside of college quizbowl. Don't continue to bank thousands of dollars on this fact every year and then try to run away from it when criticized (or, in the case of this thread, when not criticized but when you want to pretend to be criticized because you had this nonsense all cued up and ready to go).

I'm glad that the people who have chosen to post enjoyed themselves and that those teams looking to play super hard questions against nationals-caliber competition got the experience they sought. I'm not happy about what the annually predictable HFT questions, logistics, or discussion mean for high school quizbowl as a whole and the level of commitment that people at certain "epicenters of college QB" do or do not have for outreach and the long-term health of the activity. Don't bother with the usual smokescreens in response to this post; I long ago realized that it's a waste of time to try to have any sort of honest conversation about these issues with the Harvard team, so I will try to avoid a pointless circular argument by making this my only statement on the matter.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by Maury Island incident »

Not gonna lie, HFT VIII (last season's) was my first tournament ever and definitely discouraged me from quizbowl. That was really question difficulty-wise and getting wrecked by top teams-wise, not logistics-wise, though. HFT is definitely not a tournament for most teams in New England, and I can see where it turned entire teams off from quizbowl, especially in previous years when there was not a full New England circuit with several tournaments spanning all difficulty levels. This is really an advertising problem, and the set should probably be advertised as such in the initial forums announcement. Playing HFT the second time was a lot more enjoyable as a member of a much improved team who has now played hard questions and been to some questionably run tournaments.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by TheKingInYellow »

Matt Weiner wrote:
There is absolutely no way that any school besides Harvard could get away with repeatedly running a tournament like HFT. I urge you to keep this in mind when attempting, in the future, to shut down criticism with irrelevant "Harvard is not Harvard quizbowl" posts. If it were not for the reputation of your university giving people the erroneous impression that Harvard is "one of the epicenters of college QB" because "smart people go to Harvard" in the popular consciousness, then you would be pilloried for the wildly too-difficult set that you write (EVERY year), your inability to keep the tournament running on time (EVERY year), the fact that you run a 36-team event despite having no access to a building with 18 rooms in it and far from enough people to even put 1 competent staffer in each room (EVERY year), and your contemptuous, destructive attitude towards the rest of quizbowl that is trotted out whenever someone fails to realize the futility of addressing all of this and criticizes you (EVERY year). If a tournament without the benefit of the Ivy League halo were run like this, on these questions, at VCU, or Michigan State, or Kentucky, the thread would descend into chaos and there would be no hope of hosting another tournament, because teams would be pissed off and vow never to return. Compare the fallout to any other tournament running this late or using questions this inappropriate -- people leave the tournament, get angry about it, and certainly don't APOLOGIZE to the host for being upset or make plans to attend again the following year. The only reason your tournament has not been burned down by an angry mob is because of what the Harvard name means to people outside of college quizbowl. Don't continue to bank thousands of dollars on this fact every year and then try to run away from it when criticized (or, in the case of this thread, when not criticized but when you want to pretend to be criticized because you had this nonsense all cued up and ready to go).
It's days like these when the weight of all our hundreds of thousands of dirty quiz bowl dollars really rest heavy in the depths our pockets.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by rpirrie »

I hesitate to comment.
But I will anyway, not to give pointed criticisms, but to ask TDs to have a look at this tourney and to learn from it. Matt W. is right. It would be a shame if any event set back quiz bowl in New England for any reason.

Number one rule: Know what your resources are, well before the tournament starts. If they are not adequate, work to make sure they are adequate.

Let's make sure the New England tourneys scheduled for the rest of the year run smoothly. I would be very happy to help make this happen, with advice or with help at any tournament E. O. Smith attends.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by Mark Wolfsberg »

In response to Matt's post. The tournament logistics and planning were not good.

But !!!!!! your criticism of the question set bothers me a lot. Harvard advertised the breakdown of questions. It was pretty clear that there was not going to be all the trash typically contained in a NAQT set. My son who loves QB but dislikes all the baseball, rap musician, and TV show trivia questions that you always see. It was so cool to go to just one tournament with a serious academic set of questions. I believe that the reason 6 or 7 Morlan top 50 teams were at this tournament was because they wanted those questions. If you want to criticize that, perhaps you should just say that Harvard needed to say it was going to be a difficult question set. However, This was our 1st time going, and we knew it would be a hard question set.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by Auks Ran Ova »

TheKingInYellow wrote:It's days like these when the weight of all our hundreds of thousands of dirty quiz bowl dollars really rest heavy in the depths our pockets.
Playing a little fast and loose with the "our" there, person who apparently couldn't be bothered to staff this tournament.
Mark Wolfsberg wrote:But !!!!!! your criticism of the question set bothers me a lot. Harvard advertised the breakdown of questions. It was pretty clear that there was not going to be all the trash typically contained in a NAQT set. My son who loves QB but dislikes all the baseball, rap musician, and TV show trivia questions that you always see.
To be clear, I sincerely doubt that Matt's criticism of the question set is rooted in its lack of pop culture questions.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by Mark Wolfsberg »

Mark Wolfsberg wrote:But !!!!!! your criticism of the question set bothers me a lot. Harvard advertised the breakdown of questions. It was pretty clear that there was not going to be all the trash typically contained in a NAQT set. My son who loves QB but dislikes all the baseball, rap musician, and TV show trivia questions that you always see.
you wrote: To be clear, I sincerely doubt that Matt's criticism of the question set is rooted in its lack of pop culture questions.
You are probably right about this. But, We liked the lack of trash and we liked the harder questions and thought they could have been harder.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by gyre and gimble »

Matt Weiner wrote:questions that wouldn't be considered appropriate for a high school national
Hyperbole much? Or are you honestly suggesting that HFT is harder than NSC? Didn't, like, PACE certify HFT VII as an "excellent" set or whatever?
Matt Weiner wrote:a disturbing number of non-elite teams attend HFT and then never play quizbowl again
I'm not going to outright deny this because I don't have data on it. But what exactly is this disturbing number and who are these teams? I understand that when three years ago Harvard unwisely chose to approve a mirror at MSU that may have driven some teams away, but hasn't the club specifically changed its mirror policies to correct for this? Also, as far as the main site goes, I don't think Harvard reaches out to new local teams to come play HFT, so these New England teams are reading the announcement on the forums to find out about the event. They should be seeing, therefore, that the set is supposed to be difficult and not representative of regular high school quizbowl. Look at the announcement here: viewtopic.php?f=20&t=14494&p=263268&hil ... II#p263268. The caveat emptor should probably have been a little clearer in this year's announcement.
Matt Weiner wrote:pushing mirrors of this tournament on local tournaments that do not attract a nationals-caliber field like the main site does
I can't speak for this year, but last year's Illinois mirror was probably objectively a better field than the main site. For the past two years, Marist has run an invitational mirror of HFT for teams who would maximize the utility of the set. We also had a DC-area mirror and the stats were fine. The tournament has been appropriate for its audience since 2012 and that, I believe, is the continuing goal for the Harvard team, though things might have changed since I left.
Matt Weiner wrote:the Harvard team's oft-stated belief that accessible, properly run high school quizbowl is "illegitimate" and that teams outside of the 30 or so who have the interest and funding to travel to Harvard can go screw themselves
Okay, I think Ted said this once. As far as I know, nobody else who has ever been a member of Harvard Quizbowl has said or believed this. You're misconstruing the argument that "harder questions that are still in the realm of high school difficulty better differentiate higher-level teams" as "non-HFT quizbowl is illegitimate." Maybe take a step back, Matt, and ask yourself whether this demagogic stuff you're posting on your own website even makes sense. Because you'd have to read some seriously deep character flaws in the members of the Harvard club to convince yourself that the club's position is that NAQT-IS sets or HSAPQ sets or LIST are illegitimate.
Matt Weiner wrote:banking on their institutional prestige to continue hosting subpar high school tournaments
I don't disagree that the prestige of the school helps keep the tournament afloat, and that there needs to be a change toward ensuring running good, timely tournaments. But the way you've stated this makes it sound like this is some sort of conscious, calculated choice by the Harvard team. I hope you don't actually think this, because once again, you're projecting malice or dishonesty where nobody other than "people paranoid about Ivy League elitism" thinks exists.
Matt Weiner wrote:I long ago gave up on arguing these things with you because you demonstrated the same attitude emerging in this thread, where the objections of people outside the Ivy League to any Harvard behavior are considered, at best, an opportunity to amuse yourselves by posting inflammatory crap and them immediately denying it when someone posts a counter-argument.
I dare you to find an example, from 2011 onward, of "inflammatory crap" posted for the purpose of a Harvard player's amusement at lowly non-Ivy League peasants, where that player is not Ted. I say 2011 because before that Andy Watkins was head editor of HFT and it's safe to say that nobody agrees with that guy anyway.

So now I'll ask you this: Are these the "usual smokescreens" that don't permit counterarguments or debate? Or will you consider what I've said and realize that the club has in fact been responsive to criticism in the past and that we're not conspiring to bring down HSAPQ or whatever crazy thing you think Harvard people are up to? Or is your "this is my only statement on the matter" clause designed so that you don't actually have to respond to legitimate points raised by people on the other side of the discussion?

I hope you realize how colossally unfair your accusations against the Harvard team is. The only legitimate point you make is "Harvard needs to stop relying in any form on the prestige that is name brings and make sure tournaments are run properly." The disputed part of this point is Harvard's reliance on institutional prestige. And guess what? That's not important! As long as the tournaments are run properly, who cares? And nobody is disputing that the tournaments need to be run better.

Maybe take a step back, Matt, and ask yourself whether this demagogic stuff you're posting on your own website even makes sense.

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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by dxdtdemon »

Mark Wolfsberg wrote:
Mark Wolfsberg wrote:But !!!!!! your criticism of the question set bothers me a lot. Harvard advertised the breakdown of questions. It was pretty clear that there was not going to be all the trash typically contained in a NAQT set. My son who loves QB but dislikes all the baseball, rap musician, and TV show trivia questions that you always see.
you wrote: To be clear, I sincerely doubt that Matt's criticism of the question set is rooted in its lack of pop culture questions.
You are probably right about this. But, We liked the lack of trash and we liked the harder questions and thought they could have been harder.
This is why many top high school teams play college tournaments.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by hydrocephalitic listlessness »

Matt Weiner wrote: I do not think the Harvard team's oft-stated belief that accessible, properly run high school quizbowl is "illegitimate" and that teams outside of the 30 or so who have the interest and funding to travel to Harvard can go screw themselves is good for quizbowl as a whole...
I think a lot of things you've said are really valid, and I'll spend some time thinking about them. The above, however, isn't really fair--I think you're referring to something Ted might've posted a while back, and I don't think it's indicative of what any members of the current Harvard team think.
Matt Weiner wrote: I long ago realized that it's a waste of time to try to have any sort of honest conversation about these issues with the Harvard team, so I will try to avoid a pointless circular argument by making this my only statement on the matter.
I'd be happy to have a conversation with you about these issues! You know way more about them than I do, and I hope that any of the shortcomings of the tournament's organization or the set aren't seen as the product of malicious intent or apathy, but rather a lack of experience. Shoot me an email if you'd like to set up a time to talk.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by Mark Wolfsberg »

cwRsync wrote: This is why many top high school teams play college tournaments.
We wanted to see how we stacked up against other top HS teams. College tournaments require that you write questions. We are really not up to that.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by High Dependency Unit »

Mark Wolfsberg wrote:
cwRsync wrote: This is why many top high school teams play college tournaments.
We wanted to see how we stacked up against other top HS teams. College tournaments require that you write questions. We are really not up to that.
Actually, ACF packet-submission rules state that only teams who had a team member competing in a collegiate tournament prior to last competition year (so before September 1, 2013 for this year) have to submit a packet, and ACF-Fall only requires those teams to submit half-packets. Other collegiate tournaments (such as Penn Bowl) do not require packet submission.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by Lo, Marathon Ham! »

Matt Weiner wrote:questions that wouldn't be considered appropriate for a high school national
Can you please explain this? It's slightly confusing especially since the questions seemed very excellently written, just at a harder difficulty than regular season sets. Also, unless Harvard is trying to do outreach to local teams, I think most teams know what they're getting with HFT.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by 1992 in spaceflight »

Mark Wolfsberg wrote:
cwRsync wrote: This is why many top high school teams play college tournaments.
We wanted to see how we stacked up against other top HS teams. College tournaments require that you write questions. We are really not up to that.
Also, many collegiate tournaments during this semester didn't require packet submission (PADAWAN and Penn Bowl readily come to mind).
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by Fado Alexandrino »

Mark Wolfsberg wrote:
cwRsync wrote: This is why many top high school teams play college tournaments.
We wanted to see how we stacked up against other top HS teams. College tournaments require that you write questions. We are really not up to that.
Delta Burke and MUT are very good easier collegiate tournaments that don't require packet submission. While DB might not be run in all regions, MUT most likely will be.

Besides, writing questions is a really good way to improve as a player.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by ndikkala »

I was unable to find the subforum for the tournament. Where is that located? I did not go to the HFT IX @ Harvard but I was a moderator at the Marist mirror and I wanted to share some feedback on the questions.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by Important Bird Area »

ndikkala wrote:I was unable to find the subforum for the tournament. Where is that located? I did not go to the HFT IX @ Harvard but I was a moderator at the Marist mirror and I wanted to share some feedback on the questions.
It's a private forum. Request "2014 Harvard Fall discussion" from your user control panel.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by Mark Wolfsberg »

ndikkala wrote:I was unable to find the subforum for the tournament. Where is that located? I did not go to the HFT IX @ Harvard but I was a moderator at the Marist mirror and I wanted to share some feedback on the questions.
go to your "User Control Panel" then to "Usergroups"

You can select it, and submit. It took about 1/2 day for me to be admitted.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by AKKOLADE »

UlyssesInvictus wrote:
Dr. Loki Skylizard, Thoracic Surgeon wrote:
Dr. Loki Skylizard, Thoracic Surgeon wrote:
UlyssesInvictus wrote:That said, please stop trying to associate Harvard with Harvard QB. If you have an issue with the club, don't let your stereotypes about the university as a whole taint your other arguments (especially since you have a reasonable amount of other evidence below).
raynor plz
I'd encourage future participants to make sure they're properly distinguishing the target of their criticism between Harvard's quiz bowl team, Harvard University, Harvard Square, the MBTA station at Harvard, Jeremy Lin, John Harvard, "Harvard" Eddie Grant, current Lieutenant Governor of Manitoba John Harvard, Havarti cheese, Harvard Bridge, the Harvard Crimson, the Alabama Crimson Tide, the city of Harvard located in Nebraska, the Harvard Mark I, Mark I. Fox, Harvard-Westlake School, and Dartmouth. Failure to do so will lead to confusion as to who is actually being criticized in a thread about the Harvard Fall Tournament.
Okay, okay, I get it, I said something really dumb...
Here's why I criticized that particular statement (and Sarah covered some of this, but this is a big pet peeve of mine in quiz bowl and life in general): it's one thing to screw up a tournament, because that happens. Tournament directing is a skill, and it can take time to develop that skill. Mistakes will be made, and people learn from them.

When someone who's experienced like Joe Nutter - i.e., a pretty experienced dude who knows things about quiz bowl! - makes a post that gives you multiple concrete suggestions on how to avoid these problems in the future, you shouldn't respond by trying to stop him from posting and/or avoiding any public discussion of the problems at your tournament! Joe took the time out of the kindness of his heart to help you out. Improving the HFT isn't going to change anything in Michigan or Ohio quiz bowl, with the possible, fairly negligible exception of making the one or two schools from there that could travel to Harvard have a better experience one Saturday of the year. It's going to help Harvard (Quiz Bowl, to be clear) improve. It's going to help improve quiz bowl in Massachusetts and the northeast area.

Listen to the advice and see what you can do to use it to improve from it, don't become ridiculously defensive over it.

I have more thoughts on other posts in this thread that will be addressed as time allows.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by AKKOLADE »

jonpin wrote:
hydrocephalitic listlessness wrote:The staffer in question wasn't running a room solo, and initially was only slated to keep score, but requested to read due to poor math skills. Due to a miscommunication, I thought this staffer was bringing a laptop. We had something like 10-12 staffers/volunteers combined either drop out in the few days before the tournament or not show up the day of, which left us in a bit of a bind.
In all honesty, this seems to be the source of all other problems that occurred at HFT, and you need to figure out why this happened and how to not have it happen again. I ran a middle school tournament a few weeks ago, and in the last two weeks leading up to it, I went from "confident" to "panicked" to "reassured" to, on the day of, "almost panicked again" on staff recruitment. My captains and I wound up putting out a volunteer sign-up sheet ~4 days beforehand asking people to confirm they would attend, and when it turned out that several of our staffers were only available for the afternoon, my students spent Thursday and Friday trying to find people with any degree of competence they could, which enabled us to pull the tournament off with almost no issues that were publicly visible. Still, the last-minute desperation made us realize that next time, we need to send out that volunteer sign-up sheet much earlier, so that we know what our needs are.
HFT originally announced a field of 32 and then expanded it to 36. That implies that you had enough staff for 36 (and "enough staff" includes a TD and building captains if your tournament is separated). It's sure possible that you had the staff and then a dozen people bailed on you. Again, if this is the case, you need to go to those people and ask what the hell happened, because their inability to show up puts the reputation of your quiz bowl team as a host for tournaments in jeopardy. If you have an extra 6 people, then you have the ability for 2-3 people to be solving problems, to communicate stats between buildings, to distribute packets, to remove problem readers, to resolve protests should they come up. In other words, to run the tournament!
I wanted to follow up on this particular point, because I think Jon is right in some ways - this is something you should do before asking back staffers who were late drops in the future (alternatively, cross these people off your list of potential staffers) - but I disagree with him in others. Specifically: this is great advice for after your tournament, but when it's two days before the tournament and you lose X staffers because *fart noises make with someone's armpit*, all you can do is scramble as best as you can. This isn't a Harvard-specific problem, and I doubt anyone is addressing it as such.
Shangdevin wrote:I really hope that I am not "telling people how to post" here, but can we tone it down on the attacks on members of the Harvard team? Most, if not all of the criticisms in this thread have been from people who were not actually at the tournament. The few interruptions did not detriment from my tournament experience at all, and from speaking to members of my and other teams, most players feel the same way as I do.

User was warned for telling people how to post & exhibiting a remarkably precise violation of the rule against "demanding that people not criticize something that occurred at a tournament they did not attend." --the mgmt
I am not telling you how to post. I'm just noting that your post made me very, very sad (not as sad as the post of Graham Moyer, though).
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by AKKOLADE »

gyre and gimble wrote:
Matt Weiner wrote:questions that wouldn't be considered appropriate for a high school national
Hyperbole much? Or are you honestly suggesting that HFT is harder than NSC? Didn't, like, PACE certify HFT VII as an "excellent" set or whatever?
I'm sure HFT sets in the past have contained individual questions that were entirely too hard for a high school national. This is a tournament that was edited for a long time by Andy "Insane Sense of Difficulty" Watkins.
Matt Weiner wrote:a disturbing number of non-elite teams attend HFT and then never play quizbowl again
I'm not going to outright deny this because I don't have data on it. But what exactly is this disturbing number and who are these teams?
I'm not going to outright deny this because I don't have data on it. But <<I'm going to outright deny this without any data on it>>.
I understand that when three years ago Harvard unwisely chose to approve a mirror at MSU that may have driven some teams away, but hasn't the club specifically changed its mirror policies to correct for this? Also, as far as the main site goes, I don't think Harvard reaches out to new local teams to come play HFT, so these New England teams are reading the announcement on the forums to find out about the event. They should be seeing, therefore, that the set is supposed to be difficult and not representative of regular high school quizbowl. Look at the announcement here: viewtopic.php?f=20&t=14494&p=263268&hil ... II#p263268. The caveat emptor should probably have been a little clearer in this year's announcement.
Nothing said here is technically incorrect. But the logic behind it is pretty wacky. "We said this tournament was going to be hard, so people shouldn't play this tournament (in a region that, until recently, was starved for quiz bowl and didn't have too many options beyond Harvard's tourney to play)." Or, alternatively, "we said this tournament is hard, so we are automatically shielded from any criticism regarding its difficulty."

If I told you "I know that sticking a fork in a live electric socket was going to hurt, so you can't criticize me for doing it anyway," your response shouldn't be, "oh, that's perfectly logical, keep doin' your thing man."

Again, nobody can force you to actually put together a tournament that would draw new, local teams and benefit them over drawing teams from, like, three or four out-of-region schools. I really like that teams like DCC and Dorman have come to UK's tournament recently. It's a lot of fun to see their strong teams play.

However: the increased work by the likes of MIT in terms of hosting and getting more local teams active has directly lead to the rise of strong teams in your region. Once MIT started hosting tournaments on normal difficulty sets that were run with minimal issues (as far as I could tell from post-tournament commentary), teams like Lexington, AMSA, and more started showing up in my rankings. Before MIT started doing this, and Harvard was the only prominent host in the area, there were absolutely no local teams of any particular strength. I'm pretty sure this isn't just a coincidence.

I will address more of Stephen's post later.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by Cheynem »

Let's keep the discussion on the tournament and quizbowl here, fellas.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by AKKOLADE »

So I think there's only one part of Stephen's post I want to respond to.
Matt Weiner wrote:I long ago gave up on arguing these things with you because you demonstrated the same attitude emerging in this thread, where the objections of people outside the Ivy League to any Harvard behavior are considered, at best, an opportunity to amuse yourselves by posting inflammatory crap and them immediately denying it when someone posts a counter-argument.
I dare you to find an example, from 2011 onward, of "inflammatory crap" posted for the purpose of a Harvard player's amusement at lowly non-Ivy League peasants, where that player is not Ted. I say 2011 because before that Andy Watkins was head editor of HFT and it's safe to say that nobody agrees with that guy anyway.
I guess your "it has been X days since someone from Harvard has posted 'inflammatory crap' in response to an objection of people outside the Ivy League" clock has been reset to zero days.

I don't really feel like going through old posts for more of that, but the overall response from Harvard of any public criticism of HFT in the past (and so far in this thread) has been "you can say that, but we're doing things how we want to, so deal with it." I feel like going through the effort to point out flaws with HFT is going to be met with indifference at best, but I'm still going to go through and look up that information if I get a chance.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by hydrocephalitic listlessness »

Dr. Loki Skylizard, Thoracic Surgeon wrote:This is a tournament that was edited for a long time by Andy "Insane Sense of Difficulty" Watkins.
I don't really see how the fact that Andy Watkins once edited a few (much, much earlier) incarnations of HFT has any bearing on this discussion. It's not like I was going back and using 2009's HFT as a guide for head-editing this set.
Dr. Loki Skylizard, Thoracic Surgeon wrote:I don't really feel like going through old posts for more of that, but the overall response from Harvard of any public criticism of HFT in the past (and so far in this thread) has been "you can say that, but we're doing things how we want to, so deal with it." I feel like going through the effort to point out flaws with HFT is going to be met with indifference at best, but I'm still going to go through and look up that information if I get a chance.
I mean, aside from Graham's post (and he's not really an active member of the team), I really don't think this thread has shown Harvard to be indifferent or unresponsive to criticisms. As the person who head-edited the set and directed the tournament, I know I'm not, so I'd actually like to hear your thoughts!
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by AKKOLADE »

hydrocephalitic listlessness wrote:
Dr. Loki Skylizard, Thoracic Surgeon wrote:This is a tournament that was edited for a long time by Andy "Insane Sense of Difficulty" Watkins.
I don't really see how the fact that Andy Watkins once edited a few (much, much earlier) incarnations of HFT has any bearing on this discussion. It's not like I was going back and using 2009's HFT as a guide for head-editing this set.
I'm just trying to explain a comment made by someone else. I'll only add that 2010 (or 2011? I'm tired and dates are running together) isn't really that long ago.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by gyre and gimble »

I'm not going to outright deny this because I don't have data on it. But <<I'm going to outright deny this without any data on it>>.
Dude, that's pretty unfair! The point I was making is that I shouldn't have to deny this until somebody comes forward with a justification of the term "disturbing number." I'm saying I don't have to deny it yet because there's no concrete evidence to rebut. That's pretty different from affirmatively denying any possibility of teams being driven away from quizbowl by hard questions.
Dr. Loki Skylizard, Thoracic Surgeon wrote:
I understand that when three years ago Harvard unwisely chose to approve a mirror at MSU that may have driven some teams away, but hasn't the club specifically changed its mirror policies to correct for this? Also, as far as the main site goes, I don't think Harvard reaches out to new local teams to come play HFT, so these New England teams are reading the announcement on the forums to find out about the event. They should be seeing, therefore, that the set is supposed to be difficult and not representative of regular high school quizbowl. Look at the announcement here: viewtopic.php?f=20&t=14494&p=263268&hil ... II#p263268. The caveat emptor should probably have been a little clearer in this year's announcement.
Nothing said here is technically incorrect. But the logic behind it is pretty wacky. "We said this tournament was going to be hard, so people shouldn't play this tournament (in a region that, until recently, was starved for quiz bowl and didn't have too many options beyond Harvard's tourney to play)." Or, alternatively, "we said this tournament is hard, so we are automatically shielded from any criticism regarding its difficulty."

If I told you "I know that sticking a fork in a live electric socket was going to hurt, so you can't criticize me for doing it anyway," your response shouldn't be, "oh, that's perfectly logical, keep doin' your thing man."
Yeah, go ahead and use an absurd analogy to make my point look unreasonable. What exactly went so terribly wrong with HFT two years ago or last year? What are you comparing to "sticking a fork in a live electric socket"? Or even this year, has the difficulty seriously screwed people over? Here's the point I was actually making, and I think I was being pretty clear: If teams are adequately warned about what kind of questions they'll be playing, and how this is not representative of all quizbowl, they won't think "Oh, quizbowl is too hard" and quit because they've already been told that that's not the case. What is wacky about this logic? If you want to respond to my points, actually respond to the points, rather than the straw man you've put into quotation marks. To make it crystal clear, here's the point you actually want to be responding to: "The issue with HFT having run inappropriate mirrors in the past has been corrected and has not caused issues after the team altered its mirroring policies in consideration of the criticism from 2011." Also, it was not at all true that HFT was the only option for MSU to run a mirror that year. Since when did HFT control the fall tournament market in Michigan? I hope you're not being serious!
However: the increased work by the likes of MIT in terms of hosting and getting more local teams active has directly lead to the rise of strong teams in your region. Once MIT started hosting tournaments on normal difficulty sets that were run with minimal issues (as far as I could tell from post-tournament commentary), teams like Lexington, AMSA, and more started showing up in my rankings. Before MIT started doing this, and Harvard was the only prominent host in the area, there were absolutely no local teams of any particular strength. I'm pretty sure this isn't just a coincidence.
Okay, sure. It's great that MIT is doing good things for the region. I don't see how this makes HFT bad for quizbowl, and teams seem to prefer the set (and the things that differentiate it from other sets) existing than not.
Dr. Loki Skylizard, Thoracic Surgeon wrote:I guess your "it has been X days since someone from Harvard has posted 'inflammatory crap' in response to an objection of people outside the Ivy League" clock has been reset to zero days.
I hope you're not referring to my use of the word "peasants" because I think it should have been clear enough, if you understand the position of my arguments, that that was wholly facetious. I hope you don't seriously think I consider non-Ivy League people to be peasants.

If you're referring to Graham's post, he doesn't really have a horse in this race and it seems like he was poking fun at Matt's exaggerated if somewhat correct comment about institutional prestige. I don't think it's inflammatory, since it's a post that doesn't need responding to. But getting past that, you're missing the point. The point is that the team has not been inflammatory and unresponsive to criticism in the past. HFT has changed for the better because its writers have considered and responded to criticism. So Matt's characterization as the Harvard team only posting "inflammatory crap" in response to criticism is unfair.
Dr. Loki Skylizard, Thoracic Surgeon wrote:I'll only add that 2010 (or 2011? I'm tired and dates are running together) isn't really that long ago.
So what if it wasn't that long ago? That's not an argument at all! If the team's philosophy has changed and its policies have changed to meet that philosophy, then citing Andy's mistakes as evidence that the current Harvard team just doesn't know what's up is absurd.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by Mark Wolfsberg »

I think that once everyone sees the question set for themselves, they can then decide if the questions were or were not too difficult. Also, when we see the tournament stats from the teams who attended we can then draw some conclusions, which, until then, are being drawn out of thin air.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by AKKOLADE »

gyre and gimble wrote:
I'm not going to outright deny this because I don't have data on it. But <<I'm going to outright deny this without any data on it>>.
Dude, that's pretty unfair! The point I was making is that I shouldn't have to deny this until somebody comes forward with a justification of the term "disturbing number." I'm saying I don't have to deny it yet because there's no concrete evidence to rebut. That's pretty different from affirmatively denying any possibility of teams being driven away from quizbowl by hard questions.
Yeah, it was a joke. But if you're that interested in the data, you can gather it.
Dr. Loki Skylizard, Thoracic Surgeon wrote:I guess your "it has been X days since someone from Harvard has posted 'inflammatory crap' in response to an objection of people outside the Ivy League" clock has been reset to zero days.
I hope you're not referring to my use of the word "peasants" because I think it should have been clear enough, if you understand the position of my arguments, that that was wholly facetious. I hope you don't seriously think I consider non-Ivy League people to be peasants.

If you're referring to Graham's post, he doesn't really have a horse in this race and it seems like he was poking fun at Matt's exaggerated if somewhat correct comment about institutional prestige. I don't think it's inflammatory, since it's a post that doesn't need responding to. But getting past that, you're missing the point. The point is that the team has not been inflammatory and unresponsive to criticism in the past. HFT has changed for the better because its writers have considered and responded to criticism. So Matt's characterization as the Harvard team only posting "inflammatory crap" in response to criticism is unfair.
I was referring to Graham's other post that was forbidden zoned.
Dr. Loki Skylizard, Thoracic Surgeon wrote:I'll only add that 2010 (or 2011? I'm tired and dates are running together) isn't really that long ago.
So what if it wasn't that long ago? That's not an argument at all! If the team's philosophy has changed and its policies have changed to meet that philosophy, then citing Andy's mistakes as evidence that the current Harvard team just doesn't know what's up is absurd.
If we're discussing the history of HFT, then it absolutely matters. I also don't think you can claim that had no effect when in 2012 you personally decided that HFT must remain difficult.
Dr. Loki Skylizard, Thoracic Surgeon wrote:
I understand that when three years ago Harvard unwisely chose to approve a mirror at MSU that may have driven some teams away, but hasn't the club specifically changed its mirror policies to correct for this? Also, as far as the main site goes, I don't think Harvard reaches out to new local teams to come play HFT, so these New England teams are reading the announcement on the forums to find out about the event. They should be seeing, therefore, that the set is supposed to be difficult and not representative of regular high school quizbowl. Look at the announcement here: viewtopic.php?f=20&t=14494&p=263268&hil ... II#p263268. The caveat emptor should probably have been a little clearer in this year's announcement.
Nothing said here is technically incorrect. But the logic behind it is pretty wacky. "We said this tournament was going to be hard, so people shouldn't play this tournament (in a region that, until recently, was starved for quiz bowl and didn't have too many options beyond Harvard's tourney to play)." Or, alternatively, "we said this tournament is hard, so we are automatically shielded from any criticism regarding its difficulty."

If I told you "I know that sticking a fork in a live electric socket was going to hurt, so you can't criticize me for doing it anyway," your response shouldn't be, "oh, that's perfectly logical, keep doin' your thing man."
Yeah, go ahead and use an absurd analogy to make my point look unreasonable. What exactly went so terribly wrong with HFT two years ago or last year? What are you comparing to "sticking a fork in a live electric socket"? Or even this year, has the difficulty seriously screwed people over? Here's the point I was actually making, and I think I was being pretty clear: If teams are adequately warned about what kind of questions they'll be playing, and how this is not representative of all quizbowl, they won't think "Oh, quizbowl is too hard" and quit because they've already been told that that's not the case. What is wacky about this logic? If you want to respond to my points, actually respond to the points, rather than the straw man you've put into quotation marks. To make it crystal clear, here's the point you actually want to be responding to: "The issue with HFT having run inappropriate mirrors in the past has been corrected and has not caused issues after the team altered its mirroring policies in consideration of the criticism from 2011." Also, it was not at all true that HFT was the only option for MSU to run a mirror that year. Since when did HFT control the fall tournament market in Michigan? I hope you're not being serious!
What I was responding to was the second half of that quote above, where you said that since it was put in the announcement that HFT is a difficult set, that New England teams were warned and so everything's fine. I'm saying that the continued high difficulty of HFT has a downside, which is possibly stunting the growth of quiz bowl in your area.
However: the increased work by the likes of MIT in terms of hosting and getting more local teams active has directly lead to the rise of strong teams in your region. Once MIT started hosting tournaments on normal difficulty sets that were run with minimal issues (as far as I could tell from post-tournament commentary), teams like Lexington, AMSA, and more started showing up in my rankings. Before MIT started doing this, and Harvard was the only prominent host in the area, there were absolutely no local teams of any particular strength. I'm pretty sure this isn't just a coincidence.
Okay, sure. It's great that MIT is doing good things for the region. I don't see how this makes HFT bad for quizbowl, and teams seem to prefer the set (and the things that differentiate it from other sets) existing than not.
I'm saying that the continued decision to make HFT "The Hard Set in High School Quiz Bowl" is harmful because it precludes the benefits of HFT being a reasonable difficulty set, which could in turn be used to get more teams in the New England area involved in quiz bowl. This issue was particularly salient when Harvard was the only good quiz bowl host of note in the New England area. This is slightly reduced with the growth in activity of clubs like MIT, Yale, etc. but will forever remain an issue because of the cultural cache of the Harvard name
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by pajaro bobo »

Mark Wolfsberg wrote:I think that once everyone sees the question set for themselves, they can then decide if the questions were or were not too difficult. Also, when we see the tournament stats from the teams who attended we can then draw some conclusions, which, until then, are being drawn out of thin air.
There are stats from the GA mirror if anyone cares about those.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by Mark Wolfsberg »

pajaro bobo wrote:
Mark Wolfsberg wrote:I think that once everyone sees the question set for themselves, they can then decide if the questions were or were not too difficult. Also, when we see the tournament stats from the teams who attended we can then draw some conclusions, which, until then, are being drawn out of thin air.
There are stats from the GA mirror if anyone cares about those.
It's probably worth waiting till we see the results from Harvard as well. But, I am wondering if our friend Fred Morland can do a quick statistical breakdown/comparison of HFT vs (perhaps) the NAQT Invitational Series #140 that was played at quite a few other locations recently. If you don't have time its understandable..
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by AKKOLADE »

My ability to do much up to Saturday is limited to UK running our own tournament.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by Mark Wolfsberg »

Dr. Loki Skylizard, Thoracic Surgeon wrote:My ability to do much up to Saturday is limited to UK running our own tournament.
Fred you do so much: please do not make this priority
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by Good Goblin Housekeeping »

Mark Wolfsberg wrote:
Dr. Loki Skylizard, Thoracic Surgeon wrote:My ability to do much up to Saturday is limited to UK running our own tournament.
Fred you do so much: please do not make this priority
dont make running his UK tournament a priority>!!?!!
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by thomasgnd »

My A and B teams attended this tournament, and we played our morning rounds at the SOCH site, which saw the majority of the logistical issues. My B team was not finished with preliminary rounds until 2pm, at which point we all made our way to Harvard Square for an incredibly fast lunch. Both of my teams were witness to staff abruptly walking into and out of rooms during game play, and I had players spoken to in quite harsh and condescending tones by staff members who, it must be underscored, were their hosts.

These things are completely unacceptable features of the experience of a tournament, but I might take a moment to advise folks to calm down. We can resolve to cure quizbowl of issues like those that occurred at HFT, but that will never happen unless folks take a long look at how they conduct themselves at tournaments. That means abstaining from making arguments on the forums petty.

My two big takeaways, which have occurred to me after each tournament I have attended, as a player and coach, that I found to have significant issues:

1) Teams who come to your tournament are your customers and guests. It is incumbent upon you to do everything within reason to accommodate them and make them feel welcome. This means inconveniencing yourself before you would ever ask visitors to be inconvenienced. For example, do not check email and/or walk out of the room in the middle of reading a round. We saw this at HFT.

2) Quizbowl can never hope to gain the legitimacy that we all know it deserves in the pantheon of high-school extracurricular activities so long as significant work does not take place to remedy severe logistical and customer-relations mishaps that are, sadly, still common in our community. Frankly, I could not believe the ways in which my players were spoken to on a couple of occasions at this event. My B team's captain came with my A team to its first rebracketed game room to find out where her team should go, as she was never told beforehand. The reader haughtily cut her off mid-sentence and told her the room number, only to add that he could not believe she did not know. How was she to know if no one told her before? That same reader editorialized over my players' buzzes in afternoon rounds, often remarking that he had made the science questions "too easy" when one of my science players powered them. This lack of social skills is a major problem in quizbowl, and it needs to be eliminated from staffs and they way they approach guests.

I would like to thank Will Holub-Moorman for his multiple sincere responses to issues like those outlined above that I brought to his attention. If the entirety of the HFT staff had followed the lead of the tournament director, many of the problems that have been cited in this thread would have never occurred.

As far as the continued absence of statistics goes, I see no defense. Why were scoresheets for the HFT taken to New York by a student at Columbia? That makes no sense, nor does not making sure that all scoresheets are brought together, to the same place, by the end of the tournament day.

Simply put, this tournament can do better. It is staffed my many highly capable individuals. Coordination is key. So are good manners, and I do not just say that because I am writing from South Carolina.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by Mark Wolfsberg »

thomasgnd wrote:
As far as the continued absence of statistics goes, I see no defense. Why were scoresheets for the HFT taken to New York by a student at Columbia? That makes no sense, nor does not making sure that all scoresheets are brought together, to the same place, by the end of the tournament day.
I could not agree more with your entire post. In particular I am happy that you had the guts to bring up the fact that we still have not seen the stats. After all of, what we in sales call "the customer objections", I am surprised that Harvard has not acted to fix the one thing that they can still control.

I can tell you that I would much rather be going over the stats than writing on this board.

This tournament cost more than any other non-national event we go to with the least amount of discounts offered. I really do not want to think that Harvard QB put their fundraising ahead of the experience they intended to give the HS teams.

Once again I will say the question set was excellent. We really liked it, and that made up for a lot.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by Urech hydantoin synthesis »

Mark Wolfsberg wrote:
thomasgnd wrote:
As far as the continued absence of statistics goes, I see no defense. Why were scoresheets for the HFT taken to New York by a student at Columbia? That makes no sense, nor does not making sure that all scoresheets are brought together, to the same place, by the end of the tournament day.
I could not agree more with your entire post. In particular I am happy that you had the guts to bring up the fact that we still have not seen the stats. After all of, what we in sales call "the customer objections", I am surprised that Harvard has not acted to fix the one thing that they can still control.

I can tell you that I would much rather be going over the stats than writing on this board.

This tournament cost more than any other non-national event we go to with the least amount of discounts offered. I really do not want to think that Harvard QB put their fundraising ahead of the experience they intended to give the HS teams.

Once again I will say the question set was excellent. We really liked it, and that made up for a lot.
I was the person who staffed the control room and entered scoresheets during the tournament. The prelim stats are done and have been for a while, and I can offer no explanation for their absence other than Will did not upload them yet. Combined with the very early morning bus ride and the chaotic nature of the tournament, I was unable to completely enter the playoff scoresheets, and I took them with me since I had the SQBS file. I intended to enter them in on the bus ride back or on Sunday, but academic and personal things prevented that. Now that all my classes this week are over, the stats should be up by tonight, if they are uploaded on time.

If you want to view the SQBS HTML files for the prelims anyway, a link to them can be found at https://www.dropbox.com/sh/0jq95il4qyga ... mD0Wa?dl=0.
Last edited by Urech hydantoin synthesis on Thu Nov 20, 2014 7:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by hydrocephalitic listlessness »

thomasgnd wrote:As far as the continued absence of statistics goes, I see no defense. Why were scoresheets for the HFT taken to New York by a student at Columbia? That makes no sense, nor does not making sure that all scoresheets are brought together, to the same place, by the end of the tournament day.
Ben (who graciously volunteered to come up from Columbia to help out with stats) had to leave a little early (before the tournament was completely finished) to catch his bus, and took the scoresheets with him to finish up the SQBS file. I know he's had a busy week, so hopefully he'll get a chance to upload stats soon.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by Bosa of York »

christino wrote: If you want to view the SQBS HTML files for the prelims anyway, a link to them can be found at https://www.dropbox.com/sh/0jq95il4qyga ... mD0Wa?dl=0.
I was looking at this and noticed that the name of Dan Connolly (from Bethlehem) is misspelled.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by Urech hydantoin synthesis »

hydrocephalitic listlessness wrote:We'll get stats up as soon as possible. It might take a couple days, though, because most of the scoresheets are with Ben in New York.
Whoops, that will be fixed.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by Urech hydantoin synthesis »

All stats are now up at the dropbox link; the files will hopefully be hosted on the database soon.
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by hydrocephalitic listlessness »

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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by Mark Wolfsberg »

hydrocephalitic listlessness wrote:Stats are up: http://www.hsquizbowl.org/db/tournaments/2250/

Thank you very much !
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Re: HFT IX @ Harvard (11/15/14)

Post by aidden.arel »

Not to be a bother, but what's going on with the E.O. Smith B team stats?

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