2021 Penn Bowl General Discussion

[Justice William Brennan]

Thanks to everyone who played Penn Bowl 2021! This set would not have been possible without the hard work and patience of our editors and writers, who all stuck with it for nearly two years because of the pandemic. I want to single out Aseem Keyal and Jonathen Settle for special thanks; their active online presence and help with head editor duties in the past several weeks helped take the set over the finish line. Jordan Brownstein saved the day by volunteering to edit additional categories after the playtest. Sam Botterbusch, Jack Sugrue, and Alex Moon did a fantastic job organizing the (re-)packetization and proofreading in the week leading up to the mirrors. Ophir Lifshitz and JinAh Kim made helpful comments and proofread before the playtest. Ophir Lifshitz's and Aseem's work with advanced stats and the playtesters' comments helped make this set the most polished iteration of Penn Bowl in my time at Penn.

These (past and present) members of Penn Quizbowl pitched in questions for the set: Gabe Ajzenman, Sam Charney, Talia Coopersmith, Jacob Dubner, Deniz Gedik, Antonio Jimenez, JinAh Kim, Kevin Liang, Alex Moon, Ayush Parikh, Sarah Potts, Adam Robbins, Daniel Shin, and Jack Sugrue.

The editors and their categories are listed below:

American Literature: Taylor Harvey
British Literature: Margaret Tebbe
European Literature: Margaret Tebbe
World Literature: Jordan Brownstein

American History: Emmett Laurie
European History: Tracy Mirkin
Other History: Tracy Mirkin
World History: Emmett Laurie

Physics: Jonathen Settle
Chemistry: Paul Lee/Sam Botterbusch
Biology: Shan Kothari
Other Science: Shan Kothari

Auditory Arts: Michael Yue
Visual Arts: Aseem Keyal
3/3 Film: Taylor Harvey

Belief (Religion & Myth): NourEddine Hijazi
Philosophy: Jordan Brownstein
Social Science: Harris Bunker/Jordan Brownstein

Miscellaneous (Pop Culture/Current Events/Geography/Mixed Academic): Nitin Rao


Please use this thread to make comments about the set in general, including but not limited to difficulty, subdistribution, and clue philosophy. To ask for the question text or make comments on specific tossups or bonuses, please post in this thread. Packetization imbalances, typos, and similar errors should go in this thread.

[aseem.keyal]

I want to thank the Penn club for bringing me on to edit the visual art for this year's Penn Bowl (besides the film, which was edited by Taylor Harvey). Like in 2019, my goal first and foremost was to write questions that players would find interesting. This resulted in some ideas that could not be done below a 3-dot difficulty set (haloes, frescoes, Bonheur, and Carthage). I hope these were balanced by the more straightforward questions and that the difficulty of the visual art didn't feel oppressive.

While we collected buzzpoints at mirrors, I'm also interested in the subjective impressions of players (regardless of whether they specialize in visual art or not). If you have any feedback on the questions, feel free to post here or to message me on Discord or Facebook.

[DavidB256]

Thank you to everyone who made this set happen! It was super fun.

Two minor complaints:
As far as I could tell, the only statistics content in this set was two bonuses on experimental design.
The biology seemed heavily skewed towards animal science.

[Muriel Axon]

Two minor complaints:
As far as I could tell, the only statistics content in this set was two bonuses on experimental design.
The biology seemed heavily skewed towards animal science.

Thanks for your feedback! I allocated 1/1 to probability and statistics: there was Ayush's tossup on probability density functions and my experimental design bonus. There was also another bonus from the 'math/CS hybrid' subdistribution on network theory that included some statistical content. I don't know what the other experimental design bonus could have been. (Perhaps from another category?) I realize probability and statistics are important subjects, but this seemed like an appropriate amount to me. (EDIT: forgot to mention the math/CS hybrid tossup on clustering!)

I inherited the biology subdistribution from Penn Bowl in years past, which had 2/2 animal content. Here, those were:
endothermy
molting
birdsong / GABA / aphasia
flagella / Opisthokonta / monophyly (not actually about animals)

These questions were meant to ask about organismal biology of animals per se. There were other questions from other categories that mentioned animals (migration, predation, transposon bonus, French flag model bonus), but in a way that I intended to illustrate more general ideas. Among these, migration is a bit of an exception in having a lot of clues about behavior in specific animal groups, so perhaps having migration, endothermy, and molting in the first 10 packets is a bit much. Still, I hope that these questions did a good job of representing different aspects of animal biology that one would learn in different settings.

[DavidB256]

I allocated 1/1 to probability and statistics: there was Ayush's tossup on probability density functions and my experimental design bonus.

I remember there being one bonus on factorial experiments and another in the finals packet on some form of experimental design. Perhaps one of them was categorized as social science?

[Borrowing 100,000 Arrows]

I think this was one of the best Penn Bowls ever. It was really delightful to play. In particular, I believe the thought in this tournament was some of the best that's ever been written at college regular difficulty. I do think sometimes some of the more creative tossups were a little confusing and played poorly (e.g., Black Hills, Peron's exile, etc.), and should probably be tweaked before the next mirror, but this set was a great return to playing irl tournaments.

[VSCOelasticity]

I don't have much to say about editing the set. I made a concerted effort to make my questions easier because I have received a lot of criticism for the difficulty of my questions in the past. It does look like I overcorrected, as the power percentage on physics is 35%. While some of that is due to many players being good at quiz bowl, there are cliffs and misplaced power clues that I will be editing. I will also be adjusting physics questions whose power percentage were about correct, but still appear to have structural issues (momentum and strain come to mind for me here). I appreciate David's feedback on my questions in the specific discussion forum, and I welcome other to chime in! Thanks for playing!

[Zealots of Stockholm]

This set was very fun and good, if perhaps overshooting target difficulty in powers and hard parts at times. There was lots of creative and fun content, and I'll go through my notes and post specific commentary in the other thread (I also had a semi-lengthy conversation with Aseem about the VFA already).

Unfortunately we only got to hear about half the set (7 packets) at the mirror we played. Are there any plans to post the packets here? I would be happy to offer feedback on the other packets as well. I understand if there are no plans to do this, though.

Thanks to all the writers and editors for your effort!

Edit: I think this toes the line between general and specific, but packet 6(?), I think, had something like 6 tossups that could be considered as being on classics/the ancient world, which seems like entirely too many for one packet.

[Zealots of Stockholm]

After more time away from this tournament I’ve remembered that I was a little annoyed at the number of “touch your ass” easy parts in this set, especially given that the medium and hard parts trended more difficult. I can’t remember specific examples off the top of my head, but it was definitely a phenomenon throughout the day.

[vydu]

This set was fantastic and a lot of fun to play - thank you to everyone who worked on it! I remember thinking while playing that a lot of the humanities categories had a very cool interdisciplinary feel, with philosophy, literature, art, religion/myth, and history all drawing from each other in a way that made questions feel really academic/educational. I think the set made good use of its 3-dot difficulty to pull off a lot of creative/harder ideas -- I'm remembering the visual art ideas that Aseem mentioned, but also tossups like Lucia di Lammermoor, Boston in music, Foster in other arts, the arts tossup on the Andes.

Really enjoyed the science -- the physics was really rewarding and full of deep clues on core concepts. A minor note would be that some of the more "deep cut" hard parts felt very hard (thinking particularly of log(b/a), 4 in the percolation bonus, the Euler-Lagrange hard part which felt tricky to figure out in 5 seconds). I and other chem majors on UNC enjoyed the chemistry questions that rewarded more "practical" knowledge, like the bonus on Grignard reagents and the clues about Gaussian in the transition state tossup. My impression was that the astronomy tended to be very "physics-y" (gamma ray bursts, singularities, Hubble's constant) -- not an inherent criticism, but I wonder if it made it feel like there was less "normal" astro in the set. I'll try to shout out ideas I really liked in the other thread at some point.

[Subotai the Valiant, Final Dog of War]

I really enjoyed the world history in this set; I thought it was done creatively and in a way that emphasized topics from older world history that often don't get asked about in as much detail as they should. I also really loved the questions that were about the intersections of myth and culture, especially in terms of non-western myth; it was often hard to tell whether questions were myth or religion, and these questions were also overwhelmingly executed really well. There also seemed to be a lot of classics content (which I am not complaining about) that was also fresh and interesting despite how much of the classics canon has been mined. Overall, thanks for writing a great set and making our return to in-person quiz bowl so delightful!

EDIT: There seemed to be a lot of film. As I'm neither a film nor a trash player by any stretch of the imagination, I'm not sure how much was art film and how much was "trash" film, but it seemed like it was present far more than would be expected, at the expense of the other subcategories of trash and "other arts" that could have been asked about (other players noted less sports and opera). Off the top of my head, I'm pretty sure there was 1/1 film (either trash or art film) for the first 4 or 5 rounds and that nearly every single round had 1 or 2 film questions.

[aseem.keyal]

EDIT: There seemed to be a lot of film. As I'm neither a film nor a trash player by any stretch of the imagination, I'm not sure how much was art film and how much was "trash" film, but it seemed like it was present far more than would be expected, at the expense of the other subcategories of trash and "other arts" that could have been asked about (other players noted less sports and opera). Off the top of my head, I'm pretty sure there was 1/1 film (either trash or art film) for the first 4 or 5 rounds and that nearly every single round had 1 or 2 film questions.

Film (both pop culture and art film) for the first 10 rounds:
R1 - trains (Hitchcock)
R2 - Knives Out
R5 - Bollywood bonus
R7 - Breillat/Sleeping Beauty/space station bonus
R8 - Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
R10 - Rebel Without a Cause

This doesn't include the TV bonus in R3 or the tossup in R6.

[Votre Kickstarter Est Nul]

This is late, but, thanks to Penn/Nitin for having me hop on board for the US/World History. Thanks to my co-editors who helped me with alot comments and playtesting, the proofreaders, and to Ophir and Aseem for the buzzpoint data and static visualizations that made editing in between mirrors much easier. Thanks as well to those from the playtest mirrors (Will, Ryan, Mike, Tejas, Nick, hopefully I'm not forgetting anyone) that left helpful comments.

I don't have any grand philosophies to get into; I tried to write what I thought was interesting while sticking to a sub-distribution. A few questions had mixed results—Black Hills didn't play great, apologies for getting sticky with that one; Peron's exile (before the change) was in the sweet spot of too difficult but also familiar content and was thus roundly negged—but I hope for the most part bonus hard parts didn't punish anyone, TUs didn't make anyone slam their head on a table, etc.
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'We have stats, but, like Aseem said, personal feedback is always appreciated. Despite the sense that it's a dying tournament discussion medium, I always prefer a good public forum post (no matter how harsh, long, short, etc!), but I'm happy to talk in PMs here, on discord, or on fb if you have any comments. Any feedback is appreciated, even if it's after the set is clear, since it's always nice to try and improve. Thanks to those of y'all that have left comments already.