2015-2016 CALI Thanks and General Discussion

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Jason Cheng
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2015-2016 CALI Thanks and General Discussion

Post by Jason Cheng »

I'd like to thank every team and host that helped make this tournament possible. For the majority of us, this was our first major writing project, and it was fantastic seeing the amount of passion and effort that our entire writing team poured into the set over the last seven months. I'd like to thank every member of the team: Ankit Aggarwal, Hidehiro Anto, P.C. Chauhan, Aseem Keyal, Eddie Kim, Bruce Lou, Charlie Mann, Kevin Wang, Corry Wang, Kion You.

In particular, I'd like to do a little credits section to the biggest contributors of all (not that I don't appreciate the efforts of everyone else):

Corry Wang for being the Energizer Bunny of the team and pretty much finishing a third of the set in about a month and then helping everyone else finish their stuff.
Eddie Kim for his quick, excellent work on his categories and then coming through and directing packetization when I had the sudden realization that I had no idea how to do it.
Hidehiro Anto for contributing large amounts to every subject in the set and making all our lives easier
Kevin Wang for rising to the challenge by handling the entire science subject on his own with zero prior experience doing an excellent job with almost no help
Eric Mukherjee for providing lots of guidance and advice for Kevin, who had an aforementioned zero amount of experience prior to this

Though I'm ultimately proud of the final product we produced, there were many hiccups along the way due to our relative lack of experience. As such, I'd like to welcome any and all thoughts on how this set might be improved--we've already gotten tremendous feedback from our hosts so far and have been improving the set to their suggestions. I also welcome any thoughts that don't necessarily have any suggestive points, since we're all eager to know how our questions have been received.
Last edited by Jason Cheng on Mon Nov 16, 2015 9:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Jason Cheng
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Re: 2015-2016 CALI Thanks and General Discussion

Post by Jason Cheng »

In terms of general discussion, I'd like to kick things off by asking what people thought of the "Learning Initiative" approach we tried to take with many of the questions in the set. We attempted to describe things in fun and unusual ways, and in the cases of things we thought were important but unaskable at this level, we tried to integrate those concepts with different approaches. For example, there were bonuses that started out by explaining what a monogatari or judicial activism was, before asking a series of questions related to it (Tale of the Bamboo Cutter/Mt. Fuji/Tale of Genji and Citizens United/Justice Kennedy/Brown v. Board respectively).

While I know that this isn't a particularly revolutionary way of question writing, I do feel like CALI had an abundance of these questions and I actively encouraged creating more of them. One of the problems with writing a high school set nowadays is the feeling that every question has already been written and asked about before, and that questions below college regs difficulty are incapable of integrating new concepts. Whereas some writers mitigate this problem by taking the valid approach of introducing fresh leadins and bringing down answerlines/clues from college difficulty (an approach we did here as well), we also tried to solve this problem by emphasizing the didactic nature of quizbowl. After all, a core element of the draw of quizbowl is learning new things, and connecting things in novel ways or outright trying to teach people something new about a set of standard answerlines (before giving them the standard clues) directly appeals to that.
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Re: 2015-2016 CALI Thanks and General Discussion

Post by 1992 in spaceflight »

I personally have loved the Learning Initiative part of this set, and I'm looking forward to hearing from the Centralia and Fort Osage sites in a week. I thought you guys did a great job of making sure the bonuses had consistent easy parts (since 20 out of 24 teams at my site averaged over 10 PPB).

A lot of my mods also loved the social activism-related bonuses, and I hope that kind of bonus style (where you explain something and then ask about related things to it) becomes the next hot thing in high school quizbowl.
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Re: 2015-2016 CALI Thanks and General Discussion

Post by adamsil »

I thought this was a really solid set. I thought it did a few things really well, and just had a couple suggestions for improvement:

--The choice of answerline was done well. I liked that you wrote interesting tossups on "WWI" using clues from the Eastern Front or "WWII" using military weapons--it stayed accessible without (usually) being transparent.
--I enjoyed the amount of politics in the set. I have been pushing hard on civics/current events in HS sets and this set had a lot of great ideas on how to incorporate it without resorting too heavily on "what's in the news this week"-type material. The only bonus I remember disliking in this distribution was the run-of-the-mill, can-you-name-three-Republican-candidates bonus, which surely could have been made more interesting and difficult (I sincerely hope that 95% of teams 30ed this one).
--It was good to see a set with a very large religion distribution focus mainly on basic religions (Abrahamic, Hinduism, Buddhism) rather than the rarer times that you asked about minor scriptures from Zoroastrianism.
--Good attention to clue detail. Normally I have a lot of complaints about science questions being misworded or unclear; Kevin, you did a nice job. The tossup on Bar Mitzvah had some cool clues, like the multiples of 18 thing.
--Pronunciation guides were well-incorporated.
--I thought the trash was largely irredeemably dumb stuff, like Facebook/Internet memes, which probably means that it was good. It got answered, anyway. At least you added some sports questions too. :)

My major complaints:
--Packetization was the worst part of this set. It often seemed like very similar questions deliberately got grouped together, rather than separately. There was a tossup on Japan during WWII in the same round as the Iwo Jima question, a question about gold mentioning Mansa Musa's pilgrimage to Mecca in the same round as the hajj tossup, a bonus part on Albee a round before a tossup on Albee, etc. The first three rounds had an exorbitant amount of military history, especially WWI and WWII--I think there were four tossups on wars in those rounds. There were three earth science tossups in the first four rounds, I think. If you're going to toss up the USA twice (in my opinion, this is overkill; once is kind of cute, twice is just overkill), have those questions further than 1-2 rounds apart.
-Charlie, the philo/SS struck me as by far the hardest questions in the set; for instance, the Russell bonus had two hard parts, Frankl strikes me as overly difficult for HSers, and I thought the bonus part on history in the Confucius bonus was completely ungettable. I'd certainly have had no clue. The other category that seemed relatively hard to me was biology--do we really expect people to be able to say "hexosaminidase A"? And pronounce it correctly?
--A few powers ran quite long. There were some on the fifth line of the tossup, which shouldn't really happen. I actually thought the set didn't have an issue with cliffs, for the most part; I just think the powers could have afforded to be less generous.

Finally, I recognized the "teachable moment" approach of this set, and I actually strongly disagreed with it. I prefer to squeeze in as many clues into a tossup as is physically possible, rather than "explaining" the previous clues in a way that's unlikely to flatten out the pyramid for a new buzz. When I cull tossups, I specifically look to cut words that could not possibly contribute to players answering the question. Perhaps that's just a matter of different styles, but I felt like the tossups in this set could have afforded to trim some wording and add a few more clues in their place. I imagine that's not a particularly popular opinion, though. Nice job all the way through.
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Re: 2015-2016 CALI Thanks and General Discussion

Post by njsbling »

A month later and I have access to this Discussion forum.

The packet logistics at the Feb 20 Berkeley mirror were a disaster. Most of the packets were only half-complete and because we had to get the set replaced we ended up with a repeat TU.
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Re: 2015-2016 CALI Thanks and General Discussion

Post by Jason Cheng »

I apologize for the half-missing tossups--that was from an error in how I extracted the PDFs from Google Docs. The Berkeley site was the only one out of all our sites where this was an issue, and I assumed I wouldn't have to check each packet because there had been no hiccups in this in any of the half a dozen mirrors prior.

Can you let me know what the repeat TU was? Three of the members of the writing team are members of the Berkeley club and as far as I know, they resolved the issue quite quickly through their own access to the full and complete set on Google Docs--if there was a repeat tossup, that means it's still there and I'd like to address that problem now.
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Re: 2015-2016 CALI Thanks and General Discussion

Post by njsbling »

The TU on bits was in packet 2 of what we originally received and then ended up in packet 7 of the complete set.
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Re: 2015-2016 CALI Thanks and General Discussion

Post by Jason Cheng »

I'm not entirely sure what happened here--the bits TU isn't repeated in the current version of the set, and from my understanding the "replacement" packets your site received were actually just copies of the same packets I sent the night before extracted from the Google Docs folder by either Ankit, Aseem, or Bruce (I think Aseem?) while they were staffing your site. I've also looked at the revision history of our packets and there was no case in which the bits TU was moved from Packet 2 or showed up in any other packet, so I'm a little confused about how it managed to show up in Packet 7. Clearly, it happened, though, so I apologize for the inconvenience.

I've been double-checking each new zip I make of the packets in order to make sure this doesn't happen again.
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Re: 2015-2016 CALI Thanks and General Discussion

Post by Stained Diviner »

Please archive this thread.
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