What is the ceiling of QuizDB's usefulness?

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The_Parker
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What is the ceiling of QuizDB's usefulness?

Post by The_Parker »

Me and a friend were talking about quizbowl and how they study for it, and QuizDB came up. Personally, I love QuizDB, but my friend disagreed. Anyway, they said "even if you 100% memorize all of Quizdb's highschool stuff, you wouldn't be one of the top ten (generalists) in the country." Is that true?

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Re: What is the ceiling of QuizDB's usefulness?

Post by Red Panda Cub »

You would be extremely good if you did that, but it would probably not be very fun or rewarding.
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Re: What is the ceiling of QuizDB's usefulness?

Post by joshxu »

I see two major limitations of using QuizDB to study.
1) Quiz bowl questions, especially at lower difficulties, have caps on how long they can be. This means no single question will provide you with a holistic understanding of a topic. Every question will only contain a limited subset of the important and askable information concerning the answerline. Question databases like QuizDB can be useful to synthesize clues across many tossups with the same answerline. However, studying solely through this method often devolves into binary association of certain phrases/proper nouns with answerlines (e.g. when a question says [Phrase], the answer must be [Answer]). This might be effective at lower difficulties where these "stock clues" appear frequently, but at higher difficulties like nationals, the topics asked about will be more obscure. I suppose if one memorized every last clue of every high school tossup on QuizDB then they would be a beast at nationals, but realistically nobody is doing this.

2) At all difficulties, tossups are written so that the most obscure information is at the beginning, and the most commonly known information at the end. As such, tossups aren't designed in a manner that's necessarily easy to learn from. For example, a history class will probably cover events in a roughly chronological order, and when you read a book you'd read it from the beginning to the end. This is a logical way to consume information because events that have already happened, whether in real life or in a book, will influence events that have yet to happen. However, this isn't preserved in quiz bowl questions. If you solely study off of QuizDB, you'll learn a lot of clues that are associated with an answerline, but not so much how those clues interact with each other or what those clues really mean in their historical/literary/scientific/etc. context. Once again, learning by association might give you a lot of points especially at lower difficulties, but you aren't truly "learning" much if you do this.

All this being said, I still think that QuizDB is a valuable resource, but mainly in a supplementary role. It's more rewarding to first consume your information from a source that's designed for people to learn from, such as Wikipedia/other encyclopedias, a book, YouTube videos, or even your classes. This gives you a solid and more holistic understanding of each topic, avoiding the problem I pointed out in point 2 above. It'll be more helpful at higher difficulties like nationals, and at least in my opinion, it's a much more fun way to learn. Where QuizDB becomes useful is to gauge which facts are really important to remember for quiz bowl. You definitely aren't going to memorize an entire book or Wikipedia article, so QuizDB helps show you which topics and details to really focus on.

I suppose the reverse process may also be helpful: starting from QuizDB, you see which topics come up a lot. Then you use other resources like a book, Wikipedia, YouTube, etc. to learn more about these topics and fit them into context. Either way, the important thing to remember is that quiz bowl questions aren't written so people can study off of them, so using them as a primary study resource will probably produce limited results.
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Re: What is the ceiling of QuizDB's usefulness?

Post by Adventure Temple Trail »

To what extent is QuizDB still being updated, and who is doing the updating? How comprehensive is it?
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Re: What is the ceiling of QuizDB's usefulness?

Post by Amazingguysofguys »

I believe that QuizDB hasn't been updated since 2020 CALISTO. Aseemsdb is up to date and has some NHBB questions as well.
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Re: What is the ceiling of QuizDB's usefulness?

Post by robby_redford »

in my experience, QuizDB is a good tool to become a better player through memorizing stock and getting acclimated to the format, but it's not enough to solely base studying strategies off of - if you want to really get good you'll have to use outside sources you find interesting and accessible.

it's better than protobowl at least.
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Re: What is the ceiling of QuizDB's usefulness?

Post by etotheipi »

In my opinion, quizdb is the number one resource you should use while studying for quizbowl (at lower levels; at higher levels, I'd recommend aseemsdb instead). Something you should get into the habit of doing is: whenever you're reading a wikipedia article about something or in some other way learning about a topic (maybe you're reading Hamlet in lit class, or playing a famous piece in orchestra), search that topic in quizdb. This will do two things for you: (1) it will "quizbowlify" your knowledge, allowing you to turn your reading into buzzes, by teaching you what that topic is linked with, and (2) it will allow you to quickly and easily draw connections between that topic and related topics by seeing what kinds of tossups clue that topic, information about that topic roughly ordered by importance, etc. (1) is the quizbowl benefit, but (2) has helped me significantly outside of quizbowl as well.

Of course, you shouldn't just be using quizdb, but that's true of every resource: they have their own flaws, but are helpful as part of a larger studying program (except protobowl: protobowl can be very fun, but do not delude yourself into thinking that it is by any means a useful or efficient way of getting good). Also, make sure to always fact-check things you see on quizdb: I've seen far too many errors/misunderstandings in quizbowl questions, especially high school quizbowl questions, to trust the database blindly any longer.

To answer your question directly, you would probably be the single best high school quizbowl player in the nation, by a decent margin. I highly doubt it's possible to do this without getting burned out, though. A question I've had to wrangle with many times is "why am I sitting here spending hours memorizing facts to win a stupid buzzer game?" This is a question that at some point you'll have to answer, and if your study does not have meaning to it, if you don't truly care about knowing things for whatever reason, you're likely going to end up unhappy. Keep that in mind when you're planning your study.
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Re: What is the ceiling of QuizDB's usefulness?

Post by quizzical1 »

QuizDB, unlike Protobowl, You Gotta Know, and QBReader, is not limited. Despite not updated for a couple years, it does provide a sturdy database that is far superior than the others. The bad thing is that with such a large system, it is not very specific. But still, if you 100% memorized ALL of QuizDB, with thousands upon thousands of packets and tossups, in my opinion, you would be up there.

A good idea also would be to do tossups on the packet archive, which, unlike QuizDB, is consistently updated and can be nicely paired. For tossups and bonuses, search up the answer and study them. Or only the ones you don't know very well.

Alas, I am just a newbie and don't know too much. But these tips would probably aided me, and most notably others as well, if I set time, maybe like 30 or 15 minutes every day doing this. Overall, QuizDB has a ceiling of usefulness, but quite a high one, in my opinion. To answer your question, you probably one of the best generalists and definetly top 10 best specialists.
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Re: What is the ceiling of QuizDB's usefulness?

Post by voicedvelarnasal »

quizzical1 wrote: Sat Oct 21, 2023 6:36 pm QuizDB, unlike Protobowl, You Gotta Know, and QBReader, is not limited. Despite not updated for a couple years, it does provide a sturdy database that is far superior than the others.
qbreader has more questions than quizdb did what are you talking about
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Re: What is the ceiling of QuizDB's usefulness?

Post by quizzical1 »

voicedvelarnasal wrote: Sat Oct 21, 2023 11:15 pm
quizzical1 wrote: Sat Oct 21, 2023 6:36 pm QuizDB, unlike Protobowl, You Gotta Know, and QBReader, is not limited. Despite not updated for a couple years, it does provide a sturdy database that is far superior than the others.
qbreader has more questions than quizdb did what are you talking about
typo sorry
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