Mild weirdness in NAQT's protest rules, and a potential fix

Dormant threads from the high school sections are preserved here.
Locked
User avatar
CPiGuy
Auron
Posts: 1070
Joined: Wed Nov 16, 2016 8:19 pm
Location: Ames, Iowa

Mild weirdness in NAQT's protest rules, and a potential fix

Post by CPiGuy »

NAQT's rule 13.d is rather unsatisfying:
The NAQT rulebook wrote:If the clues of a tossup question (at the point at which a player signaled) do not uniquely specify an answer, then the tournament director should consider when the signaling occurred:
i. If the player signaled prior to the end of the first sentence of the question, the response shall be treated as incorrect. That is, players may not protest that they gave an answer that was “correct when they buzzed” during the first sentence of the tossup.
ii. If the player signaled after the end of the first sentence, the response shall be accepted if it is correct (for all the clues that had been read) and precise. If the response was correct but imprecise (and thus should have been prompted), the remedy of Rule J.13.g should be applied.
This rule makes sense because you do not want players buzzing in before enough substantive material has been given to establish an answer:

-- I am reminded of an instance in a tournament I staffed in which the first two words of a tossup were the name of a country's prime minister, and the player immediately buzzed in with the name of the country. The question was not, in fact, on that country, and he was negged and attempted to protest. This protest obviously should not be accepted, in my opinion -- his buzz was brave but quizbowl players should expect that they may guess incorrectly when attempting to guess the pronoun, and should not be allowed to use protests to change that.

-- Similarly, if a player buzzes in on the words "This state's city of Salem" and says one of the many states with a city of Salem, she should not be rewarded if she guesses incorrectly; if she wants points, she should be expected to know enough about geography to know that there are many cities of Salem and that she ought to wait for the full clue.

However, this rule can also lead to players' legitimate protests being denied:

-- Consider a tossup whose first clue is "A torus is equal to the Cartesian product of two of these mathematical objects". Were I to buzz on "two of these", say "spheres" (because circles are 1-spheres in topology and this clue is about point-set topology, so this answer should at least be prompted), and be negged, under NAQT's rules, I would have no recourse for protest, even though waiting until the end of the first sentence would not have changed my buzz at all.

I propose the following rule change (which I believe was originally proposed on Discord by Ned Tagtmeier in some form), then, in order to preserve the intent of the rule while not punishing players for making aggressive correct buzzes on solid knowledge:
If the clues of a tossup question (at the point at which a player signaled) do not uniquely specify an answer, then the tournament director should consider when the signaling occurred:
i. If the player signaled prior to the end of the first sentence of the question, the response shall be accepted if it would have been correct and precise after the entirety of the first sentence of the question were read. That is, players may not protest that they gave an answer that was "correct when they buzzed" if the remainder of the first sentence would render it incorrect, but may protest if the first sentence was incorrect regardless of whether it was buzzed on early or not. If the response was correct but imprecise in that context (and thus should have been prompted), the remedy of Rule J.13.g should be applied.
ii. If the player signaled after the end of the first sentence, the response shall be accepted if it is correct (for all the clues that had been read) and precise. If the response was correct but imprecise (and thus should have been prompted), the remedy of Rule J.13.g should be applied.
I am interested to know what other people think of this rule and my proposed alteration to it.
Conor Thompson (he/it)
Bangor High School '16
University of Michigan '20
Iowa State University '25
Tournament Format Database
whatamidoinghere
Wakka
Posts: 156
Joined: Wed Apr 25, 2018 10:07 pm

Re: Mild weirdness in NAQT's protest rules, and a potential fix

Post by whatamidoinghere »

Personally I'm not a fan of the current NAQT first sentence rule based on the fact that if the question doesn't contain an entirely specific clue, the player still should be able to protest in the first sentence if they protest later and get their protest accepted off previous clues (including the clues in the first sentence). I am reminded of when there was a question on transformers in HSNCT 2019 where our opponent negged with "generators," protested, and got it right, which they would not have if they buzzed in the first sentence based on this rule even though most of the clues applied to both transformers and generators. It seems pretty cut and dry that if the full first sentence requires prompting or accepting an alternate answer, the player should be able to protest in the first sentence.

Edit: I don't know how to construct sentences + elaborating first sentence.
Locked