FACTS General Discussion

Dormant threads from the high school sections are preserved here.
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rehg98
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FACTS General Discussion

Post by rehg98 »

Please use this thread to discuss anything about FACTS not related to specific questions; there is a separate thread for question-specific discussion. We hope that these discussion threads will help us improve and polish FACTS for further mirrors, and thus we welcome any and all criticism. A breakdown of major subject editing:

Science and Fine Arts: Ryan Golant
History and Geography: Jakob Myers
RMP and Social Science: Clark Smith
Literature: Shrayus Sortur

We look forward to hearing your feedback. Thank you!
Ryan Golant
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Re: FACTS General Discussion

Post by Couch's Kingbird »

For the sake of discussion, I'll outline what I discussed with Ryan, Jakob, Clark, and a few others previously (aside from the obvious issues like repeated answerlines/vague wording/missing alternate answerlines):

- The difficulty of the set swung a lot. In literature specifically, there were some very hard answerlines (the hard part in Murakami) but also a lot of really easy 30s (eg Woolf). I also thought philo and science was hard, but don't take my word for it as I don't know too much about those areas.
- On the same thread: powers generally seemed pretty tough to get. That being said, there were also TUs like Maupassant and Miller which were very straightforward powers
- Some of the answerlines were tough (NMR for instance was tossed up), both bonuses and tossups included
- I personally wasn't a fan of the "clever" lead ins, especially the "sick" literature one (which made everyone in my room cringe)

Anyways, I do hope the literature gets significantly revised; that seemed to be the area with the most trouble, especially difficulty wise.
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Re: FACTS General Discussion

Post by vrohan »

Since this set involves packet submissions, could someone please post which packets were read in each round at QuBIT? (of course, only if possible)
Rohan Venkateswaran
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Re: FACTS General Discussion

Post by nsheidlower1 »

I second what Julia said regarding her criticisms. I really did enjoy many of the answerlines and felt that quite a lot of them (specifically literature) featured clues that are challenging and non-stock heavy. That being said, I do feel that some of the literature tossups were weak in terms of structure or were a bit too difficult. For example, the Fireside Poets tossup was not pyramidal in the slightest (including a famous Oliver Wendell Holmes poem first line really just came down to do you know what a fireside poet is). Others I felt were a bit too easy and resulted in numerous buzzer races (like Ricardo Reis first line for Portugal or Covent Garden second line for Pygmalion).
There were some extremely notable difficulty cliffs within quite a few tossups, including the Elgar one which led to a 6 person buzzer race. That being said, I felt like the fine arts was fantastic: challenging, creative, and overall well-written. With the exception of the aforementioned Elgar one and the obsession with Britten clues in power for two separate tossups, I thought that the fine arts was pulled off really well.
I did enjoy the history, but like what Julia said, there were very noticeable changes in difficulty within packets (going from a very stock Ceaucescu clue first line to tossing up Ashanti Empire felt a bit strange). I also felt that overall, some of the power markings were a tad too short and some were rather long (having a power marking end at the end of the 2nd sentence vs. having a power marking end at the middle of the 4th sentence for two tossups of similar difficulty and category).
With regards to bonuses, I felt that a few of the hard parts for science and philosophy specifically were almost inaccessible at a high school level. I believe a notable example was the bonus that went Parole, Saussure, Derrida with no easy, middle, hard structure (if I'm not mistaken). That being said, I love the challenge and the excitement of pulling some of these hard parts since including parts that do not frequently come up at high school level helps expose all teams to other interesting pieces of information.
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csa2125
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Re: FACTS General Discussion

Post by csa2125 »

vrohan wrote:Since this set involves packet submissions, could someone please post which packets were read in each round at QuBIT? (of course, only if possible)
1 Canyon Crest
2 High Tech
3 Ladue
4 Westview
5-13 Editors 1-9, respectively.
Clark Smith
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Re: FACTS General Discussion

Post by csa2125 »

nsheidlower1 wrote: With regards to bonuses, I felt that a few of the hard parts for science and philosophy specifically were almost inaccessible at a high school level. I believe a notable example was the bonus that went Parole, Saussure, Derrida with no easy, middle, hard structure (if I'm not mistaken). That being said, I love the challenge and the excitement of pulling some of these hard parts since including parts that do not frequently come up at high school level helps expose all teams to other interesting pieces of information.
The Derrida bonus has been significantly reduced in difficulty after an overestimate on what players would know vis a vis other thinkers (I can post any alterations to any questions in the specific questions thread if anyone wants to see). Because this tournament was intended to be regular plus, many answers which have been used as hard parts for a while were reduced to middle, and some new material was taken from the canon of easy college tournaments for new hard parts.

Since we didn't use Ophir's stats or have any other conversion data, we would appreciate hearing more specific concerns about specific questions in that thread to know what we should alter.
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Re: FACTS General Discussion

Post by The Hands Resist Him »

A few things that jumped out to me when playing:
-Bonus difficulty seemed all over the place: the TKAM bonus (and I think the Tom Sawyer bonus too, but my memory is hazy on that one) was incredibly easy to 30 for anyone who's read the book (which is a lot of people), while on the other extreme, there were some bonuses that pretty good teams were having trouble even getting 10 points on (again, my memory is hazy, so I can't come up with specific examples, but I saw a fair number of 0s with pretty good teams)
-There were some issues with repeats--I seem to remember two tossups on India that both had giveaways talking about the Taj Mahal (and there were a lot of other bonus parts/tossups that also had "India" as an answerline). Also, I think Saul Bellow was a bonus part in 2 different bonuses. Other examples off the top of my head: a tossup on the Berlin Wall a round after a tossup on Berlin, I'm pretty sure Istanbul was a tossup the round after a question about Turkey, two consecutive rounds had bonus parts about Australia
-The math in this set skewed pretty hard in general, I thought (granted, I'm not great at math, so take this with a grain of salt)
-It generally could have used another read-through for polishing (fixing minor details like not having foreign language acceptable answers for "Carnival of the Animals"; there were a few places where the answerline didn't provide enough direction on whether to accept borderline responses. Also, there were a few grammar errors, places where the same bonus was copied twice, etc.)
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Re: FACTS General Discussion

Post by 34 + P.J. Dozier »

A couple of my thoughts on the set (I'm going to stick to specifically talking about fine arts and literature because that's what I'm most familiar with):

- There were MASSIVE difficulty shifts throughout the set. Some packets were noticeably harder than others (I can confirm that it was not just me – our moderators as well as fellow players noted this); there were some ridiculously easy 30s (Virginia Woolf, To Kill A Mockingbird, etc.) followed by completely bageled bonuses; there were several answerlines that seemed either a bit too contrived (Fireside Poets and the music tossup on the ocean, for example) or a bit too difficult for a high school regular-plus set (now, I'm the farthest thing from a science player, but some science bonus parts had even our moderators, who are members of the MIT quizbowl team, scratching their heads, so I'm inclined to believe that something was off).

- There were also a handful of repeated answerlines (I can't recall more off the top of my head, but I do recall that Saul Bellow and Humboldt's Gift were mentioned at least twice in two separate bonuses) as well as a ton of repeated clues, although I believe that the folks at MIT may have probably already brought that up, by the looks of it.

- Literature in particular seemed very vulnerable to shifts in difficulty as well as quality. The Melville tossup, for example, felt pretty stocky even in power, but I really enjoyed the many creative and well-executed answerlines (Macondo sticks out as a good example of this) as well. Other tossups seemed a little too easy/prone to buzzer races (Pygmalion, Eugene O'Neill, T.S. Eliot, etc.), especially considering the difficulty of the set as a whole.

- For the most part, I really enjoyed the fine arts in the set (particularly music). I did have a few issues here and there (for example, I don't think it's reasonable to expect anyone who's seen or studied Copley's portrait of Paul Revere to know that his vest is green, particularly because it honestly looks black), but overall, the difficulty and quality of the fine arts in this set were very consistent and fair.
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Re: FACTS General Discussion

Post by vrohan »

csa2125 wrote:
vrohan wrote:Since this set involves packet submissions, could someone please post which packets were read in each round at QuBIT? (of course, only if possible)
1 Canyon Crest
2 High Tech
3 Ladue
4 Westview
5-13 Editors 1-9, respectively.
Same, but for the MIT mirror. Also, I would suggest that future mirrors specify this in their stat reports, if that isn't too much work.
Rohan Venkateswaran
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Re: FACTS General Discussion

Post by kwang »

vrohan wrote:Same, but for the MIT mirror. Also, I would suggest that future mirrors specify this in their stat reports, if that isn't too much work.
The order of the packets at MIT should have been the same as at QuBIT.
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Re: FACTS General Discussion

Post by Stained Diviner »

Please archive this discussion.
David Reinstein
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