Study Method

[lleytonio]

I am a freshman who has done quiz bowl NAQT before but wants to start studying for real now so I did some research and decided the best way was to go on the quiz bowl frequency lists with qbreader and write down 5 facts/works/books for each answer that has shown up at least 35 times by asking ChatGPT. I plan on eventually making flashcards for all of the facts and studying them using Anki. I also plan on doing qbreader toss-ups sometimes to keep up with my question answering skills. Is this a good study method or should I stop and try something else.

[Good Goblin Housekeeping]

I would not encourage asking chatgpt for facts if you aren't VERY aggressively vetting for validity - consider just doing database search, qbreader's db lets you just look at previous tus and look up what's coming up a lot in tossups on the topics/answerlines you want to learn more about. (Also as a general thing it's probably good to do non-quizbowl centered reading about things to actually gain a useful background on topics which is helpful for longer-lasting semantic retention as well/ability to "just kind of guess the answer")

[lleytonio]

How would you advise actually deciding what facts to write down because I tried using the database at first and ended collecting a lot of facts that I felt would be way too much and not useful to flashcard so I asked chatgpt for key facts. Right now my notes are structured like this:

1.Nathaniel Hawthorne
a.The Scarlet Letter
b.The House of the Seven Gables
c.Young Goodman Brown
d.The Minister's Black Veil
e.The Blithedale Romance
2.Sylvia Plath
a.The Bell Jar
b.Ariel
c.Daddy
d.The Journals of ____
e.The Colossus
3.Catch-22
a.Joseph Heller’s most popular book
b.Paradoxical Rule for pilot and non-linear structure book
c.Book set on fictional island of Pianosa
d.Protaginist: John Yossarian
e.Character: Milo Minderbinder
f.Character: Colonel Cathcart
g.Character: Doc Daneeka
h.Character: Orr

Would you advise for me to restart my notes and use qb reader's database or should I just continue my notes using the database.

[quizbowlchamp1]

Those notes are a very good start. I would consider adding more notes on the works you have (Scarlet Letter, Daddy, etc.) I also recommend using Anki and converting ur notes into flashcards. Anki is the best app for this and is what I use to improve.


What I do is generate questions from the database based on whatever subcategory and difficulty I want (check my signature to see what i'm doing now!) and then make flashcards from the clues in those questions (i highly recommend using powermark only until you get to collegiate difficulties)

[lleytonio]

Would you say a good strategy is just to answer questions on a specific category and difficulty and just create flashcards on every question I get wrong, if so, how many flashcards would be good for each category to get a decent grasp of the "canon". Also, is there a way to find out what categories show up the most because I wouldn't want to focus on sub categories that barely show up

[RexSueciae]

I'll begin with a caveat that I never really took notes to study for quizbowl, never used flashcards, etc. Also, I remember what was probably the first (?) quizbowl answerline frequency list, which was neat, but I never really used it for much more than a fun curiosity.

With that in mind, my suggestion is to make slightly more complex notes. Memorizing the names of books or stories or poems that an author wrote is fine, but it's very surface-level. It's good to know those sorts of things because then when you hear "for 10 points, name this author of The Scarlet Letter," at least you're not letting the tossup go dead. So it's a start!

But at some point you'll want to learn other clues, too. Not just character names, but plot points and things like that. (Higher difficulty quizbowl might have more complex clues -- you probably don't have to worry about literary criticism for now.) And yeah, you could flashcard it, pull info from SparkNotes or Wikipedia or older questions, but for anything that's not too long (poetry or short fiction), I suggest that you just read the work itself. Nathaniel Hawthorne's short stories are pretty readable, and have long been in the public domain, so you can find them wherever. Sylvia Plath's poetry is usually of sensible length, and with poetry in general you can usually find someone's posted it on the internet (either on a reputable site like Poetry Foundation or somewhere else). Save your flashcarding efforts for things that are harder to digest -- you're not necessarily trying to memorize this information, you're trying to get familiar enough so that when you hear a tossup, you think "oh yeah that sounds like Plath" and buzz on the clue.

That's my take on things, and at this point my thoughts start to diverge from the topic of how to study / take notes, so just to reiterate, I'm of the belief that familiarity is better than memorization.

[Somewhere in the Stratosphere]

I'll begin with a caveat that I never really took notes to study for quizbowl, never used flashcards, etc. Also, I remember what was probably the first (?) quizbowl answerline frequency list, which was neat, but I never really used it for much more than a fun curiosity.

With that in mind, my suggestion is to make slightly more complex notes. Memorizing the names of books or stories or poems that an author wrote is fine, but it's very surface-level. It's good to know those sorts of things because then when you hear "for 10 points, name this author of The Scarlet Letter," at least you're not letting the tossup go dead. So it's a start!

But at some point you'll want to learn other clues, too. Not just character names, but plot points and things like that. (Higher difficulty quizbowl might have more complex clues -- you probably don't have to worry about literary criticism for now.) And yeah, you could flashcard it, pull info from SparkNotes or Wikipedia or older questions, but for anything that's not too long (poetry or short fiction), I suggest that you just read the work itself. Nathaniel Hawthorne's short stories are pretty readable, and have long been in the public domain, so you can find them wherever. Sylvia Plath's poetry is usually of sensible length, and with poetry in general you can usually find someone's posted it on the internet (either on a reputable site like Poetry Foundation or somewhere else). Save your flashcarding efforts for things that are harder to digest -- you're not necessarily trying to memorize this information, you're trying to get familiar enough so that when you hear a tossup, you think "oh yeah that sounds like Plath" and buzz on the clue.

That's my take on things, and at this point my thoughts start to diverge from the topic of how to study / take notes, so just to reiterate, I'm of the belief that familiarity is better than memorization.

i once firstlined a Dostoevsky tu on qbreader because something sounded vaguely like something Dostoevsky wrote (it was a line from Demons, which I have never read)