The majority of high school tossups on the Mali Empire are terrible.

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The majority of high school tossups on the Mali Empire are terrible.

Post by Vixor »

I am only considering tossups between the regs- and regs+ level of high school.

Firstly, I notice every Mali Tossup at this difficulty tends to clue the Gbara legislature or the Catalan Atlas's depiction of Mansa Musa first or second line. If the tossup is feeling especially daring, it will clue the Twelve Doors early in the tossup as well. These common first/second lines are not only problematic because of their prevalence in Quizbowl itself, but the historical significance, especially in the Catalan Atlas which inspired European incursions into Africa. This is especially problematic, as these clues are generally early regardless of specific difficulty within regs- to regs+.

Speaking of Mansa Musa, many tossups rely on him and his reign too heavily, especially his construction of the Djinguereber Mosque, funding of the Sankore University, and employment of al-Sahili early on, but also his crash of the Cairo gold market and hajj later.

Some interesting, and underused clues include Abu Bakr II's voyage to explore the Atlantic, Ibn Battuta's visit of Mali under Sulayman, and the Taghaza
salt mines.

Aditionally, I'd like to point out that Sumanguru, the Battle of Kirina, and Sundiata Keita are clued at very odd points in the tossup. Generally, Sundiata should be clued directly out of power for regs, near last line for regs+, and power for regs-. Generally Most FTP clues are also decent, usually mentioning Mansa Musa and Timbuktu.

Generally, tossups on the Mali empire have great potential to be interesting; however, that is quite frequently wasted at the high school level with misplaced clues, be it to early or too late, or overused clues, while disfavoring perfectly fine clues that would make sense at this difficulty.
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Re: The majority of high school tossups on the Mali Empire are terrible.

Post by Santa Claus »

Wouldn’t including new clues and moving more common clues later in the question make questions harder, thus putting them outside of the range in question of regs- to regs+?
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Re: The majority of high school tossups on the Mali Empire are terrible.

Post by Stained Diviner »

One way to solve part of this problem is to not toss up Mali Empire in high school regs- sets.
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Re: The majority of high school tossups on the Mali Empire are terrible.

Post by Krik? Krik?! KRIIIIK!!! »

I think this thread is a good place to discuss how we consider a lot of world history at a regs- or regs level! I haven't done a lot of regs- work, so I'll only comment on regs difficulty for this post.

When I write a regs tossup, I'm always thinking in the back of my mind that the audience playing the set is really big! It ranges from teams that could be competitors at a national championship, to newer players who may be starting to recognize clues from stuff they've seen in class. With this being said, its really important to balance out questions so that:

1. Dominant players can be dominant while lower-level teams can still compete against each other towards the end of the question.
2. There's a balance between "quiz bowl" knowledge and external studying versus content students find in classrooms.

I remember at my high school, the Honors "world history" course started essentially in 1492 and was mostly about Europe or colonialism across the world. This may be unique for my experience, but I think if you asked anyone in that class this question, they wouldn't be able to get any of it may be at the end. That's a problem that you face with trying to scale world content to regs: there's a pretty big gap between what's taught in an American classroom versus the huge amount of world content out there. So, with that being said, world content at the regs level is in a tough spot, and has to either:

A. Stick to basics/barebones facts
B. Incorporate some element of colonialism/Europe into the question (now this is my opinion but I try to minimize the number of world questions that are just "Europeans around the world")
C. Highlight "quiz bowl famous" authors/books.

What do I mean by quiz bowl famous? I mean things that I've learned from playing quiz bowl that are heard every set (i.e. Things Fall Apart or One Hundred Years of Solitude as regs world literature, or in this case, Mali as African history in regs level packets). I'm NOT saying that these things are only famous because they're in quiz bowl: Achebe and Gabo and Mali are all really important and super cool subjects!! They just happen to come up a lot, which can draw some eyerolls from experienced players who have the clues battened down.

So what can be done about this?

1. Write questions from new perspectives/answerlines. I remember a recent hs regs packet that had a tossup on "gold" instead of Mali, but used some of the same clues in a similar vein to get to the answer. Things like asking about different goods, or a leader, or other common links that are within reason and aren't super crazy are pretty good ways to go.

2. Try to find at least one cool new clue, or a new way to talk about something that comes up all the time. For instance, maybe you could find a cool way about the Gbarra was run? Or something interesting about Mansa Musa's wild ride to Mecca? I like to try and make every question I write have at least one thing new to the answerline so it can contribute to the development of knowledge over time. I see how reading the same "Mali" question over and over could be a little annoying over time, but that's what regs writers have to work with to make a gettable question with that answerline at the regs level.

TL;DR Regs World content is usually limited in scope, so it leads to repeated clues/answerlines a lot. Writers could help remedy these by finding creative (but sane) answerlines or new ways to talk about clues.
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Re: The majority of high school tossups on the Mali Empire are terrible.

Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

I defer to Jakob Myers or others more well-read on this subject, but to my knowledge one of the issues we have here is that the primary source material is very limited in terms of what can be reasonably asked, while any attempts to foray into deeper historiography are doubtless going to fall outside of the purview of high school students. A lot of the history of the Mali Empire was transmitted orally and the transmission of this material outside West Africa into academic historiography has only been a major project since the era of decolonization. There's probably a good amount there that still hasn't been transmitted into a written form, so we're stuck with al-Umari, Ibn Battuta, material from the Epic of Sundiata, and a few other things. I'm not particularly well-read on the archaeology here either, admittedly, but outside of an occasional lead-in that is probably a bridge too far at this level.

In addition, all of the tossup ideas that Ganon proposes have, in fact, been done at college tournaments in some way or another. This is not to say this is a bad thing, but rather that the system does in fact work - it's just people are more conservative with their answers at the high school level. However, there's probably something else up here.

I think a lot of this ultimately is a product of how many high school tossups get produced. Many of the writers are competent players in their subjects who learn about things in the natural way you'd do so - study old packets, read things on Wikipedia, or pay attention in world history class (if that's possible in the era of Zoom school). So they write questions the same way and the most salient facts there naturally get put in. I wouldn't say these questions are bad per se, but rather that they inevitably play out poorly among experienced players who prepare with the exact same material that the writers use. Naturally, this problem gets worse as more and more study material becomes available over time.

I don't do much high school level history work, but I think there's room to expand the answer space in some of these areas. I have no idea what the conversion rate on an answer like Timbuktu would be at the HS Regs level - it would probably be harder than median, but I doubt lower than 50% and you should have some of those mildly tougher answers in every set anyways. Gold / salt / etc. have been done before but still offer room for fresh material, geographic feature tossups have been a fruitful area of expansion in some instances, etc.

This all being said, we ought to have some charity in mind for the writers who, for lack of a better phrase, don't know much better - and for editors who are crunched to get things out on time and aren't inclined to rework a question that goes "yeah I've seen it before, but the clues are in the right order." This charity and a gentle nudge here and there, or a suggestion of a reframing to the writer, can go a long way.
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Re: The majority of high school tossups on the Mali Empire are terrible.

Post by A Dim-Witted Saboteur »

As an East Africanist I probably know just about as much about the Mali empire as Will does, but both his points about endogenous sources largely having been written down centuries after their oral creation and exogenous sources being few and Ganon's that Vishal probably came close to listing everything you can reasonably expect the audience of a regular difficulty HS set to know struck me as correct (although there's a lot of material in e.g. Al-Bakri and Sundiata, so at this level you run up against Ganon's difficulty constraints first). I wish the high school curricula that you need to ground these sets in (as opposed to in college, where you're much freer) were less stupid about Africa, but alas they are not.
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Re: The majority of high school tossups on the Mali Empire are terrible.

Post by at your pleasure »

naan/steak-holding toll wrote: Thu May 13, 2021 10:37 pm I'm not particularly well-read on the archaeology here either, admittedly, but outside of an occasional lead-in that is probably a bridge too far at this level.
Also, I kinda get the sense that most of what's "well-known in the public Western eye" about African archaeology is pretty centered on Ife and Nigerian bronzework, Malian ceramics, etc, and especially the stuff that got stolen and put in Western museums less so on e.g. basic research archaeology.
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Re: The majority of high school tossups on the Mali Empire are terrible.

Post by Thebest1won »

I agree with many of the points here. There is a systemic failure on Mali Empire tossups throughout all of quizbowl, and it is time for a reckoning on the subject and in quizbowl in general.

The failure comes from a misconception on what truly makes a good quizbowl question. A popular point of view is that a good question is simply a set of previously memorized facts related in some sense to the answer line. There is some logic to this approach, but it is the root cause for our many modern Mali mistakes. For the Mali Empire in particular, but also other less-studied topics, there is a very limited set of facts question writers expect students to know on the topic. This issue has been amply discussed above, but combined with the previous tendency to view questions as a combination of facts it is fatal to many would-be Mali question writers.

Quite simply, if writers view questions as collections of facts, and the number of known facts on a subject is approximately the size of one quizbowl question, guess what, every question will use those same facts. So we arrive at the issue described in this thread, where we have a limited numberof possible facts ("canon," if you will) that keep on getting repeated.

The question writer must get creative. They must stop viewing questions a question as a set of facts, and start viewing it as something more. They must, in a question, get students to think. In fact, I would go as far as to say that zero statements question writers reasonably expect people to know about the Mali Empire should be included in an ideal Mali Empire question. What do I mean by this? I will give an example.

This is an example of a typical Mali Empire tossup found on quizdb:
"Members of this empire’s Dyula merchant caste were influential members of its Gbara assembly. A leader of this empire is depicted holding a scepter in Abraham Cresques’ Catalan Atlas. This empire, which trained scholars at a university in Sankore, used bundles of rodier palm and mud to build the Great Mosque of Djenné. According to legend, the founder of this empire used the spur of a white rooster to kill Sumarungu at the Battle of Kirina. Another ruler of this empire is said to have depressed the value of gold in Cairo by handing out money during his pilgrimage to Mecca. For 10 points, name this African empire ruled by Sundiata and Mansa Musa."

I could reduce this tossup to "Dyula, Gbara, scepter in Abraham Cresques’ Catalan Atlas, university in Sankore, Great Mosque of Djenné, Sumarungu, Battle of Kirina, gold in Cairo, Sundiata, Mansa Musa," and the tossup would be effectively the same. In other words, the tossup is not a tossup; it is a collection of memoizable names/places/events that requires essentially zero thought to answer. While not an optimal situation, this is fine (in terms of maintaining the status quo) on topics where a sufficiently large number of facts exist. Students can compete to see who memorized more. For Mali, the number of facts is so low that the same facts keep being repeated, leading to our problem.

I will now demonstrate how a radically different Mali question would likely solve the problems described in this thread.
"The ruins of this empire's town of Tadmekka lies in the modern-day town of Essouk, which means "the market" in Arabic. Ibn Khaldun wrote about the contemporary fall of Tadmakka to this empire. Tadmekka's currency of gold dinars was noticed by travelers to its caravanserai, located next to cemeteries containing Arabic and Tifinagh inscriptions. Ibn Fadlallah al-Umari, an early Mamluk scholar, detailed Tadmekka's contemporary revolt from this empire. That Tuareg revolt on the north-eastern fringes of this empire mirrored a more successful one two centuries later that pushed this empire south and consequently away from the gold and salt trade. For 10 points, name this empire that conquered the Berber town of Tadmekka to consolidate control of Trans-Saharan trade after the preceding influence of the gold-producing Empire of Ghana."

The question itself is probably not great, and likely too difficult (both of these issues can be solved), but notice the difference between my question and the previous ones. For my question, the facts are necessary, but not sufficient. To get the question you need to think about the facts and how they apply to the situation. Not only does this solve the issue in the original post by radically expanding the number of facts that can be used in Mali tossups (this is a tossup about a minor, obscure town controlled by Mali for only a few decades), it promotes a radically new way of quizbowl. Memorization is needed, for people need something to think about, but thinking critically is the ultimate goal. I am almost certain no quizbowl player would previously know any of these sentences (not referring to specific facts within them, but the sentence itself); one has to take the information in the sentence, apply it, and think about it to get the answer. The Mali Empire is key for a radical re-imagining of quizbowl away from memorization and towards actual thought. No more may mindless memorization massacre the mind, and Mali is to thank.
Last edited by Thebest1won on Mon Aug 23, 2021 9:35 pm, edited 5 times in total.
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Re: The majority of high school tossups on the Mali Empire are terrible.

Post by Good Goblin Housekeeping »

Thebest1won wrote: Mon Aug 16, 2021 11:01 pm
I will now demonstrate how a radically different Mali question would likely solve the problems described in this thread.
"The ruins of this empire's town of Tadmekka lies in the modern-day town of Essouk, which means "the market" in Arabic. Ibn Khaldun wrote about the contemporary fall of Tadmakka to this empire. Tadmekka's currency of gold dinars was noticed by travelers to its caravanserai, located next to cemeteries containing Arabic and Tifinagh inscriptions. Ibn Fadlallah al-Umari, an early Mamluk scholar, detailed Tadmekka's contemporary revolt from this empire. That Tuareg revolt on the north-eastern fringes of this empire mirrored a more successful one two centuries later that pushed this empire south and consequently away from the gold and salt trade. For 10 points, name this empire that conquered the Berber town of Tadmekka to consolidate control of Trans-Saharan trade after the preceding influence of the gold-producing Empire of Ghana."
? Doesn't this just say tadmakka like 8 times with really bulky language
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Re: The majority of high school tossups on the Mali Empire are terrible.

Post by Thebest1won »

Oh No You Didn't wrote: Tue Aug 24, 2021 11:10 am
Thebest1won wrote: Mon Aug 16, 2021 11:01 pm
I will now demonstrate how a radically different Mali question would likely solve the problems described in this thread.
"The ruins of this empire's town of Tadmekka lies in the modern-day town of Essouk, which means "the market" in Arabic. Ibn Khaldun wrote about the contemporary fall of Tadmakka to this empire. Tadmekka's currency of gold dinars was noticed by travelers to its caravanserai, located next to cemeteries containing Arabic and Tifinagh inscriptions. Ibn Fadlallah al-Umari, an early Mamluk scholar, detailed Tadmekka's contemporary revolt from this empire. That Tuareg revolt on the north-eastern fringes of this empire mirrored a more successful one two centuries later that pushed this empire south and consequently away from the gold and salt trade. For 10 points, name this empire that conquered the Berber town of Tadmekka to consolidate control of Trans-Saharan trade after the preceding influence of the gold-producing Empire of Ghana."
? Doesn't this just say tadmakka like 8 times with really bulky language
The point is that people aren't going to get the answer from having memorized the name Tadmekka, but from thinking about the "bulky language" that surrounds it and how it applies to the question.
Last edited by Thebest1won on Tue Aug 24, 2021 11:37 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The majority of high school tossups on the Mali Empire are terrible.

Post by Arabidopsis failiana »

Thebest1won wrote: Mon Aug 16, 2021 11:01 pm
"The ruins of this empire's town of Tadmekka lies in the modern-day town of Essouk, which means "the market" in Arabic. Ibn Khaldun wrote about the contemporary fall of Tadmakka to this empire. Tadmekka's currency of gold dinars was noticed by travelers to its caravanserai, located next to cemeteries containing Arabic and Tifinagh inscriptions. Ibn Fadlallah al-Umari, an early Mamluk scholar, detailed Tadmekka's contemporary revolt from this empire. That Tuareg revolt on the north-eastern fringes of this empire mirrored a more successful one two centuries later that pushed this empire south and consequently away from the gold and salt trade. For 10 points, name this empire that conquered the Berber town of Tadmekka to consolidate control of Trans-Saharan trade after the preceding influence of the gold-producing Empire of Ghana."
I could reduce this tossup to "Tadmekka, Essouk, Tadmakka, Tadmekka, caravanserai, Arabic and Tifinagh, Tadmekka, Tuareg, gold and salt, Berber, Tadmekka, Ghana," and the tossup would be effectively the same. In other words, the tossup is not a tossup; it is a collection of memorizable names/places/events that requires essentially zero thoughts to answer.
Thebest1won wrote: Mon Aug 16, 2021 11:01 pm They must stop viewing questions a question as a set of facts, and start viewing it as something more. They must, in a question, get students to think. In fact, I would go as far as to say that zero statements question writers reasonably expect people to know about the Mali Empire should be included in an ideal Mali Empire question.
If you want to read things that you don't already know, you can read a book. Quizbowl questions have to be answerable in order to make quizbowl a competitive activity. Writing tossups that you don't expect anyone to be able to answer might be a valuable academic task to learn more about a subject, but it's not going to make for a fun competition.
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Re: The majority of high school tossups on the Mali Empire are terrible.

Post by Thebest1won »

Arabidopsis failiana wrote: Tue Aug 24, 2021 11:31 am
Thebest1won wrote: Mon Aug 16, 2021 11:01 pm
"The ruins of this empire's town of Tadmekka lies in the modern-day town of Essouk, which means "the market" in Arabic. Ibn Khaldun wrote about the contemporary fall of Tadmakka to this empire. Tadmekka's currency of gold dinars was noticed by travelers to its caravanserai, located next to cemeteries containing Arabic and Tifinagh inscriptions. Ibn Fadlallah al-Umari, an early Mamluk scholar, detailed Tadmekka's contemporary revolt from this empire. That Tuareg revolt on the north-eastern fringes of this empire mirrored a more successful one two centuries later that pushed this empire south and consequently away from the gold and salt trade. For 10 points, name this empire that conquered the Berber town of Tadmekka to consolidate control of Trans-Saharan trade after the preceding influence of the gold-producing Empire of Ghana."
I could reduce this tossup to "Tadmekka, Essouk, Tadmakka, Tadmekka, caravanserai, Arabic and Tifinagh, Tadmekka, Tuareg, gold and salt, Berber, Tadmekka, Ghana," and the tossup would be effectively the same. In other words, the tossup is not a tossup; it is a collection of memorizable names/places/events that requires essentially zero thoughts to answer.

If you want to read things that you don't already know, you can read a book. Quizbowl questions have to be answerable in order to make quizbowl a competitive activity. Writing tossups that you don't expect anyone to be able to answer might be a valuable academic task to learn more about a subject, but it's not going to make for a fun competition.
I certainly do expect people to answer it; I just do not expect they will know the statements in the tossup. People will have to think about the information contained in the statements (time period, language, location, ethnicity, etc.) and apply it to get the answer. Is it a different competition? Yes. But I'd argue it's more fun to think about the information you learn and apply it to a subject rather than simply having a competition on who memorized more.
Last edited by Thebest1won on Tue Aug 24, 2021 11:47 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: The majority of high school tossups on the Mali Empire are terrible.

Post by Good Goblin Housekeeping »

To be clear my contention is that this is a very "fluffy" question and it is possible to provide clue-dense language which both provides context and also explicitly buzzable points because this could be condensed into like 2-3 lines and be functionally equivalent
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Re: The majority of high school tossups on the Mali Empire are terrible.

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Oh No You Didn't wrote: Tue Aug 24, 2021 1:11 pm To be clear my contention is that this is a very "fluffy" question and it is possible to provide clue-dense language which both provides context and also explicitly buzzable points because this could be condensed into like 2-3 lines and be functionally equivalent
I understand what you are saying, but many of the clues are explicitly hidden. The first sentence, for example, has no less than four hints that lead to the answer. It gives the modern day language (very rough geographic location), "the market" (town likely relies on commerce/trade), they are ruins (relatively old empire), and the town's name itself, Tadmekka, (intimately connected with Islam). What looks like fluff at first glance is actually the "hidden" clues you have to think about that each help a bit in getting to the answer. Just from the first and second lines alone one of my teammates was able to guess that it was one of the three main West African empires. Cutting it down to 2/3 lines would remove a whole lot of those hints and ultimately the entire point of the question, which thinking about how those small hints/clues lead you to the answer. The end goal is to remove all "explicitly buzzable points," because it shouldn't be a memorized fact that gets you to the answer but thinking critically about those memorized facts.
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Re: The majority of high school tossups on the Mali Empire are terrible.

Post by Good Goblin Housekeeping »

Thebest1won wrote: Tue Aug 24, 2021 1:26 pm
Oh No You Didn't wrote: Tue Aug 24, 2021 1:11 pm To be clear my contention is that this is a very "fluffy" question and it is possible to provide clue-dense language which both provides context and also explicitly buzzable points because this could be condensed into like 2-3 lines and be functionally equivalent
I understand what you are saying, but many of the clues are explicitly hidden. The first sentence, for example, has no less than four hints that lead to the answer. It gives the modern day language (very rough geographic location), "the market" (town likely relies on commerce/trade), they are ruins (relatively old empire), and the town's name itself, Tadmekka, (intimately connected with Islam). What looks like fluff at first glance is actually the "hidden" clues you have to think about that each help a bit in getting to the answer. Just from the first and second lines alone one of my teammates was able to guess that it was one of the three main West African empires. Cutting it down to 2/3 lines would remove a whole lot of those hints and ultimately the entire point of the question, which thinking about how those small hints/clues lead you to the answer. The end goal is to remove all "explicitly buzzable points," because it shouldn't be a memorized fact that gets you to the answer but thinking critically about those memorized facts.
So disregarding the fact that like 1/2 of this question is (not very subtly) saying "ho hum we're in west africa" or "wow all of these small hints keep e answertelling me we're in a north african empire without actually meaningfully narrowing down the answer if I don't know where tadmekka exactly is/was in which case I would have just buzzed 7 words in" this kind of question that relies on deep thinking about every word that's read doesn't actually work with quizbowl questions because things are read in real life, where people live and don't have 30 seconds to reflect on the last 3 words they've heard.

Also what makes so-called "memorized facts" that you refer to any worse than "memorized facts" like "mecca is a city with significance in islam" or "a bunch of north african empires practiced islam" or
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Re: The majority of high school tossups on the Mali Empire are terrible.

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Oh No You Didn't wrote: Tue Aug 24, 2021 2:42 pm
Thebest1won wrote: Tue Aug 24, 2021 1:26 pm
Oh No You Didn't wrote: Tue Aug 24, 2021 1:11 pm To be clear my contention is that this is a very "fluffy" question and it is possible to provide clue-dense language which both provides context and also explicitly buzzable points because this could be condensed into like 2-3 lines and be functionally equivalent
I understand what you are saying, but many of the clues are explicitly hidden. The first sentence, for example, has no less than four hints that lead to the answer. It gives the modern day language (very rough geographic location), "the market" (town likely relies on commerce/trade), they are ruins (relatively old empire), and the town's name itself, Tadmekka, (intimately connected with Islam). What looks like fluff at first glance is actually the "hidden" clues you have to think about that each help a bit in getting to the answer. Just from the first and second lines alone one of my teammates was able to guess that it was one of the three main West African empires. Cutting it down to 2/3 lines would remove a whole lot of those hints and ultimately the entire point of the question, which thinking about how those small hints/clues lead you to the answer. The end goal is to remove all "explicitly buzzable points," because it shouldn't be a memorized fact that gets you to the answer but thinking critically about those memorized facts.
So disregarding the fact that like 1/2 of this question is (not very subtly) saying "ho hum we're in west africa" or "wow all of these small hints keep e answertelling me we're in a north african empire without actually meaningfully narrowing down the answer if I don't know where tadmekka exactly is/was in which case I would have just buzzed 7 words in" this kind of question that relies on deep thinking about every word that's read doesn't actually work with quizbowl questions because things are read in real life, where people live and don't have 30 seconds to reflect on the last 3 words they've heard.

Also what makes so-called "memorized facts" that you refer to any worse than "memorized facts" like "mecca is a city with significance in islam" or "a bunch of north african empires practiced islam" or
Yes, I agree that the questions would have to be slowed down to make it work properly. Again, as I have said previously, memorized facts are necessary, but thinking about those facts and how to connect them to the answer rather than the question outright giving you that connection is the important difference. The memorized information is a means to an end (thinking critically) rather than the end itself.
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Re: The majority of high school tossups on the Mali Empire are terrible.

Post by Krasznahorkai did nothing wrong »

I don't wanna bash more on this question cuz I know it's written to prove a point not to be the best question it possibly can be, but I do think it makes a mistake that I really don't wanna see in history tossups at any level. The fluff that provides hints here is just not unique because this question assumes that certain practices, material cultural artifacts, and influences are confined to a single political entity (the Mali empire). What happened to Tadmekka when Mali fell? Did the people there stop speaking Arabic, stop trading gold dinars, and no longer write funerary inscriptions Arabic and Tifinagh? I really don't know the answers to any of these questions because I am not an Africanist but my point is that there is no reason to assume that these things were only done while the people living in Tadmekka were part of the Mali empire. This is important because it shows that the "fluff" that players are required by this question to parse is not specific, and that is dangerous. Is it not worrying that your team mate immediately knew it was West African empire and had no way to tell which it was?

What you are terming "critical thinking" is very much not that, rather it is a gross simplification of how to look at history. The thought process that you want a player to go through while hearing this question is to use an understanding of influences, culture, and interactions in history to claim to know something rather than relying on specific names for the most part. While that sounds great, I think it's really difficult or straight up impossible to actually foster that. People will buzz on this question not because they have gone through some sort of cognitive mapping that leads them to "Mali" but because like Wang said they'll just buzz 7 words in and get it correct even if they don't know anything about Mali other than it is an African empire that can be plausibly tossed up in quizbowl. This is not what you want in a question. Rather than the critical thinking you want to inspire, this question encourages players to make super reductive guesses (that ignore any salient differences between really any west African empires) that go completely against what you want in history question: to have players demonstrate that they have specific knowledge about specific things and to learn. If Wang first clues this tossup by randomly buzzing 7 words in, does that show that he knows anything about Mali? Does it show he can differentiate information about Mali from information about Ghana or Songhai? I'd argue that no, it doesn't. If you expect people to magically guess that it is Mali based on non-specific information, you relegate every other people that those clues could have applied to to the historical periphery. That's just bad homie, and I think it's a really harmful praxis for writing questions and for studying history in general.
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Re: The majority of high school tossups on the Mali Empire are terrible.

Post by Santa Claus »

Thebest1won wrote: Mon Aug 16, 2021 11:01 pm The failure comes from a misconception on what truly makes a good quizbowl question. A popular point of view is that a good question is simply a set of previously memorized facts related in some sense to the answer line.
there's not really an argument to be made that a question (good or otherwise) is not, in a very literal sense, a set of facts related to an answerline. while some sort of value judgement could be made about what "deserves" to be talked about, it is a fact of human existence that the retention of information is an intentional act; thinking that any question could be written without relying on the player at some point having memorized facts of some nature is very silly. here is a complete list of information that someone could have that isn't "memorized facts":
  • internalized semantic structure of human language (arguable)
  • the sensations associated with physical existence
  • the perception of colors
  • various emotional states
I do not think one can construct tossups on the mali empire from these fragments.

beyond these silly jokes and the practical issues with uniqueness/construction which were already pointed out, I would pretty fundamentally disagree with the idea that quiz bowl should, for some arbitrary reason, not reward people who have learned information about a subject that has committed the crime of "being important enough to have been in past questions". besides, questions are not only written for people who have played a hundred sets, especially at high school regular difficulty; for many people a given tossup on the mali empire is the first time they have encountered such a question. if you want to be challenged, play a harder tournament; otherwise just take your points.
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Re: The majority of high school tossups on the Mali Empire are terrible.

Post by Thebest1won »

Santa Claus wrote: Tue Aug 24, 2021 4:17 pm
Thebest1won wrote: Mon Aug 16, 2021 11:01 pm The failure comes from a misconception on what truly makes a good quizbowl question. A popular point of view is that a good question is simply a set of previously memorized facts related in some sense to the answer line.
there's not really an argument to be made that a question (good or otherwise) is not, in a very literal sense, a set of facts related to an answerline. while some sort of value judgement could be made about what "deserves" to be talked about, it is a fact of human existence that the retention of information is an intentional act; thinking that any question could be written without relying on the player at some point having memorized facts of some nature is very silly. here is a complete list of information that someone could have that isn't "memorized facts":
  • internalized semantic structure of human language (arguable)
  • the sensations associated with physical existence
  • the perception of colors
  • various emotional states
I do not think one can construct tossups on the mali empire from these fragments.

beyond these silly jokes and the practical issues with uniqueness/construction which were already pointed out, I would pretty fundamentally disagree with the idea that quiz bowl should, for some arbitrary reason, not reward people who have learned information about a subject that has committed the crime of "being important enough to have been in past questions". besides, questions are not only written for people who have played a hundred sets, especially at high school regular difficulty; for many people a given tossup on the mali empire is the first time they have encountered such a question. if you want to be challenged, play a harder tournament; otherwise just take your points.
I try to make this clear in my post, but ideally, memorized facts should be the start point, not the end point, and not nonexistant either. For example, in my tossup, if you happen to know what empires Tadmekka was a part of, then you are on your way to the answer. If you know when Ibn Khaldun was around, you know the approximate date. When I wrote "A popular point of view is that a good question is simply a set of previously memorized facts related in some sense to the answer line," the key word is simply. A good tossup is more than that. As you pointed out, eliminating memorizable facts entirely will get you nowhere. What will get you somewhere is using those facts and putting them in a context where players have to think about them and apply them to get the answer. In my tossup, the facts that I would expect players to know are tangential; the statements themselves, the players likely would not know beforehand, and the question writers should not expect those statements to have been previously memorized. Extracting those tangential facts, applying them to the situations detailed in the statements, and finally, the answer, is how a tossup can be more than simply a set of memorized facts and get players to think.
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Re: The majority of high school tossups on the Mali Empire are terrible.

Post by Thebest1won »

Krasznahorkai did nothing wrong wrote: Tue Aug 24, 2021 3:05 pm I don't wanna bash more on this question cuz I know it's written to prove a point not to be the best question it possibly can be, but I do think it makes a mistake that I really don't wanna see in history tossups at any level. The fluff that provides hints here is just not unique because this question assumes that certain practices, material cultural artifacts, and influences are confined to a single political entity (the Mali empire). What happened to Tadmekka when Mali fell? Did the people there stop speaking Arabic, stop trading gold dinars, and no longer write funerary inscriptions Arabic and Tifinagh? I really don't know the answers to any of these questions because I am not an Africanist but my point is that there is no reason to assume that these things were only done while the people living in Tadmekka were part of the Mali empire. This is important because it shows that the "fluff" that players are required by this question to parse is not specific, and that is dangerous. Is it not worrying that your team mate immediately knew it was West African empire and had no way to tell which it was?

What you are terming "critical thinking" is very much not that, rather it is a gross simplification of how to look at history. The thought process that you want a player to go through while hearing this question is to use an understanding of influences, culture, and interactions in history to claim to know something rather than relying on specific names for the most part. While that sounds great, I think it's really difficult or straight up impossible to actually foster that. People will buzz on this question not because they have gone through some sort of cognitive mapping that leads them to "Mali" but because like Wang said they'll just buzz 7 words in and get it correct even if they don't know anything about Mali other than it is an African empire that can be plausibly tossed up in quizbowl. This is not what you want in a question. Rather than the critical thinking you want to inspire, this question encourages players to make super reductive guesses (that ignore any salient differences between really any west African empires) that go completely against what you want in history question: to have players demonstrate that they have specific knowledge about specific things and to learn. If Wang first clues this tossup by randomly buzzing 7 words in, does that show that he knows anything about Mali? Does it show he can differentiate information about Mali from information about Ghana or Songhai? I'd argue that no, it doesn't. If you expect people to magically guess that it is Mali based on non-specific information, you relegate every other people that those clues could have applied to to the historical periphery. That's just bad homie, and I think it's a really harmful praxis for writing questions and for studying history in general.
You're right. My question is nonspecific (it might be better if, with some minor modifications, the answer was West Africa). But I don't believe that that means the ideas of moving away from a focus on purely memorized facts have no value. It says more about the fact that I don't know enough about the specifics of the Mali Empire compared with other empires of its region to write a tossup specifically distinguishing it as Malian than the general idea of prioritizing thinking over just facts. Now it is not easy to narrow in on a specific empire when you are trying to avoid an overt focus on specific memorized facts, I agree. But I still believe it is possible and worthwhile to do so. I don't think all you want in a history question is for players to "demonstrate that they have specific knowledge about specific things." Yes, that should be part of it, but thinking about those facts and interacting with them is much more worthwhile than reciting an answer in response to them.

Side note: Tadmekka declined soon after its revolt from Mali and then fell out of prominence, but its heyday was before the Malian conquest.
Last edited by Thebest1won on Tue Aug 24, 2021 6:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The majority of high school tossups on the Mali Empire are terrible.

Post by dwd500 »

Consistently expecting some intellectual version of a religious experience out of a game seems like a great way to set yourself up for a lot of disappointment in life.
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Re: The majority of high school tossups on the Mali Empire are terrible.

Post by Krik? Krik?! KRIIIIK!!! »

I will throw out the warning that this thread is beginning to go 1. increasingly off its original topic and more to generalized ideas about question writing and 2. get stuck in the weeds about semantics. I'll contribute one point:

I think there is room for a little lateral thinking in quiz bowl, but its definitely not what the core of a question should. End of the day, quiz bowl is about rewarding knowledge. Period. It doesn't matter if you got that knowledge because you read about it in class, carded it from online, its something your grandmother told you about, you saw it in a video game - it doesn't matter.

Lateral thinking like the type in the question (specifically in tossups moreso than bonuses, but more on that in a second) is really hard to parse at game speed. Let's say I'm a high schooler and the sample question you gave is the first I've ever played. I may be not confident to buzz at all if I've never ever heard of Tadmekka (which I think is a safe assumption for most American high schoolers). People who are buzzing from lateral thinking develop that ability from hearing the same topics and clues come up in quiz bowl. In that sense, if we were to reward more lateral thinking than actual knowledge, then people would be learning for the sake of getting the questions right in quiz bowl through a gambling-esque series of assumptions about clues versus locking down knowledge that may be useful in other parts of life.

As mentioned, I think a little lateral thinking is OK. Tossups are not very well suited for this as every word counts and players don't have that much time to parse before receiving new information. If you don't want to repeat clues, then usually you can find more clues that are relevant to the subject but may not have come up before. For instance, going back to the subject of Mali, let's say I want to find a way to clue Mansa Musa's hajj without directly saying it. I could find a fun story or anecdote that still has relevant information in it, like people involved or a location or something. The clue about Musa causing a financial crisis in Cairo due to his wealth is an example of this originally which after being used enough turned into its own clue. A writer I think is really good at this style of writing is Jaskaran Singh - check out his writing for history on LIT for more examples.

Bonuses naturally give teams time to process things. One trend I've noticed in recent tournaments is for the hard part to be the first part of the bonus and to give harder information or sometimes context clues, but not the whole picture.

In the end, any question I write needs to be precise, playable, within the knowledge reach of the difficulty, and pyramidal. I would prioritize those in writing far before any lateral thinking, though keeping questions new and finding new ways to ask about things is always welcome.
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Re: The majority of high school tossups on the Mali Empire are terrible.

Post by neilbreen »

Thebest1won wrote: Tue Aug 24, 2021 1:26 pm The end goal is to remove all "explicitly buzzable points," because it shouldn't be a memorized fact that gets you to the answer but thinking critically about those memorized facts.
When quizbowl puts an emphasis on "thinking critically," the usual result is something more like "figuring out what the writer was thinking when they wrote the question," which is by far the least fun way to play quizbowl.
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