IAC History Bee question concerns

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IndianaMan13
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IAC History Bee question concerns

Post by IndianaMan13 »

Dear quiz bowl community,

I have often dismissed what I’ve interpreted as pedantic and/or comically inflammatory criticism that college players and olds levy against David Madden as baseless and/or self-defeating.

For context, I would describe myself as a decently performing player at multiple events (though that I made History Bee finals this year is all you really need to know), who has attended nationals for the past three years in person.

However, at this year’s National History Bee, an incident occurred that I and many others; both esteemed competitors and IAC staff whose anonymity I will protect here, found genuinely shocking, and that I, in solidarity with them and with input from many others in the quiz bowl community, feel obligated to speak up about.

Multiple participants are in agreement that the National History Bee semifinals packet for the 7th and 8th grade divisions contained at least 12 out of 30 questions copied verbatim from 2022 History Bee Nationals backups.

Obviously, this is extremely disappointing for many participants and antithetical to good quiz bowl (which I have always considered IAC to be, at
least in format and style, regardless of question quality).

This has placed a shadow over the legitimacy of the finals of one of the marquee events at IAC Nationals, affecting both contestants who may have made finals on a set that better tested genuine knowledge, and those who would have finished better or worse in finals against different opposition.

While the efforts of multiple finalists and spectators to discuss concerns with IAC staff including David Madden directly after finals could very understandably not be resolved immediately, his response seemed to insinuate that he had/has no position of direct oversight or even review that would make this, packets he commissioned and at some point must have willingly declared fit and sent out, his problem. This shows a fundamental problem with the way IAC is written, however it is uniquely opaque to an extent that I have no idea who’s responsibility this was and what and/or how many levels this had to pass through without so much as an inquiry to be approved in advance and make it to the three semifinals mods’ laptops.

To end this post, I have an aspirational request directed to IAC and Madden as a figurehead, and more importantly a call to (in)action.

I would like us to hear an open explanation of how this error occurred, and whether the expectation is that future iterations of this competition may also contain recycled, publicly available questions? Additionally, we expect as a minimum for the legitimacy of the organization to be upheld that IAC makes more transparent the broader writing process in some way.

Lastly, until we are able to get clarity on the issues discussed above, I have one final plea of you as a small spokesperson for a unified voice:
I ask for anyone who respects the spirit of the game that IAC implores you to follow in their online honesty pledge to not play in, staff, advertise, or otherwise tacitly condone IAC competitions until this matter has been addressed, and to keep holding IAC, and any higher powers in quiz bowl for that matter, accountable going forward.
Evan Ting (she/they/he) aka Indiana Man
History/poetry/bio/various other things specialist, fraud merchant, Manchester United/Mountain Goats/gaming/game dev/Indiana flag cape/other stuff fan
2nd 2024 MSNCT
Sycamore 2024
Park Tudor 2028
"Timor mortis morte pejor" - Robert Burton
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LHDoroschuk
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Re: IAC History Bee question concerns

Post by LHDoroschuk »

Dear Evan and IAC Families,

My name is Lee Holden and I am the Director of Question Production for IAC, a position I have held since 2022. I want to apologize to you directly for what happened with the History Bee semifinals in Orlando. This mistake is on me, as I made the judgment call to personally rework some of the playoff packets after feeling that the set was playing harder than I had anticipated. For most of this work, I relied on questions from our internal stockpile, but for some of it I reached into older, edited packets that had been unplayed and, so I thought, unseen by any players. The mistake lies in the fact that I was unaware that the 2022 History Bee backup round had been posted online. This was an honest mistake based on my failure to double-check the rounds posted in our resources page online. I want to be clear, the semifinals was the only round affected by this mistake and it will certainly not happen again.

I pride myself on the hard work that goes into our question production. Every year, writers submit thousands of questions to our internal submissions system, which my team then edits and builds into tournaments. My eyes are on every single question that gets played in both our domestic and international competitions every year. Sometimes I make mistakes, but this was obviously the biggest one of my tenure. So again, I take full blame for this error of judgment on my part.

What I did want to say is that we are building in two major methods to avoid any issues like this in the future:

1) We are building an internal question database that we can check all answerlines and question content to avoid both mistakes and/or potential plagiarism in the future

2) We are now answer-blanking every question for our tournaments prior to writing them going forward. This means that rather than just accepting submissions from writers and building the sets from those, we will instead have the entire tournament's answers in place before we begin writing the questions. This will prevent excessive difficulty swings long before the sets are completed and avoid any last-minute packet reworks, such as the one that caused this issue

As I said above, this kind of question security issue has never happened before and I am sad to say it was a direct result of my failure to check whether that backup packet had been posted online. So, once again, I apologize for this mistake and I hope we can make right with the community on this one. I have stood proudly on the quality of our questions since my tenure began two years ago, and I want to make sure that I can continue to stand proudly despite this error in judgment.

Thank you,

Lee Holden

Director of Question Production, IAC
Lee Holden
Director of Question Production, International Academic Competitions
Bennington '26 (Grad), Wofford '18 (Undergrad), Dorman '14 (HS)
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Yeah, that's a thing
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Re: IAC History Bee question concerns

Post by Yeah, that's a thing »

We are building an internal question database that we can check all answerlines and question content to avoid both mistakes and/or potential plagiarism in the future
Oh boy; it's 2024 and NHBB is just doing this now?

I sure hope NHBB has moved on from writing nationals questions the night before and morning of the tournament like during my unfortunate tenure.
Connor Teevens
Detroit Catholic Central '11
Michigan State University '15
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