Your Long Answerlines Might be a Problem

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Sima Guang Hater
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Your Long Answerlines Might be a Problem

Post by Sima Guang Hater »

One issue I noticed this weekend is that the prompt lines were often very long or tortuous. This is a double-edged sword, because complex prompt instructions can make the game much more difficult, especially for newer moderators. I think it's worth hashing out the role of prompt lines and how they can be streamlined.

My fundamental premise is this - quizbowl is a game of navigating linear chains of concepts. At the core, a clue should clearly and unambiguously refer to an answer. Your job as the player is to internalize a fact from a clue, associate it with the correct answer, and be rewarded for your trouble. The first two steps are made difficult when clues are written with unusual grammar or in a tortuous fashion, or clues refer to more than one answer, or clues are incorrect.

The last step, however, is the role of prompts, alternate answers, and ensuring your answerlines are as precise and un-ambiguous as possible. Just like it's important to not confuse a player with a vague clue, it's also important that if a player has perfect knowledge of a clue, they shouldn't sit there wondering what exactly you're asking for. The point of an expansive answerline is to reward knowledge that isn't perfectly encompassed by the bare answerline. One way to do this is to give the player a chance to demonstrate additional knowledge, for example by directing you from "King Louis" to "Louis XIV", or "Punic War" to "Second Punic War'. The other way is to reward the player whose knowledge is specific to the clue they buzz on or to one aspect of the answerline - accepting "sicke-cell anemia" for a TU on many different kinds of anemia is an example of that, or when someone names a specific subgroup of Slavs for a tossup on Slavs as an ethnic group. They're supposed to serve the player, not the writer. However, it seems that a lot of extensive prompt lines nowadays exist for other reasons.

One way prompts are abused is when an answerline is inherently vague or difficult, but is justified by the writer/editor by using extensive prompting (i.e. the existence of prompts is used to justify more weasel-y answerlines); this is the opposite of what a prompt should be used for, which is making an unambiguous answerline even more unambiguous. A recent example is that art tossup on "flaying" from ACF Regionals 2022, which has clues about artworks that lack skin in addition to things like "The Flaying of Marsyas". This tossup seems to throw together somewhat unrelated things - like anatomic studies and actual artworks depicting flaying or flayed people - in a way that was empirically confusing for players.

A similar example is when prompts are used in the service of an answerline that would just work better as something else. I don't really see the point of having a TU on the house from Beloved (instead of just using the same clues for a tossup on Beloved) or a bonus part on the house from She Stoops to Conquer instead of on a concretely-named concept like Kate Hardcastle or the book itself. I understand that it seems "creative" to do this, but you can reward the same knowledge without making the player's and moderator's lives harder, and that should take precedence.

Another example is prompts being used in the service of overly stingy answerlines, instead of just accepting things outright. Two that come to mind are the tossup on Japanese earthquakes that has a directed prompt for tsunamis, or the tossup on "text" using NLP clues which doesn't accept things like "natural language data". At that point, the player in my estimation has demonstrated sufficient knowledge of the answer to get points outright, and adding a directed prompt just makes more work for everybody. In particular, it seems like an antiprompt or a directed prompt could probably be replaced with outright acceptance a lot of the time.

A final example is when answerlines have to encompass a million different related concepts, when you...just don't have to do that. There was an excellent bonus on chromatin loops at ACF Regs 2022, but the answerline was asking you to name one of the techniques that capture chromatin loops, which include 3C, 4C, 5C, Hi-C, ChIP-loop, ChIA-PET, and more all the time. Just make the bonus part on chromatin with clues like "loops in this substance can be detected using 3C, 4C, etc" and you're testing the same knowledge without pushing the moderator excessively.

When you write a question with a long answerline, step back and consider whether it's in the service of the player, or whether it's for you. Chances are if it's the latter, there's a better way to write your question that helps the player navigate from clue to points.
Eric Mukherjee, MD PhD
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Coach, University School of Nashville

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touchpack
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Re: Your Long Answerlines Might be a Problem

Post by touchpack »

Sima Guang Hater wrote: Sun Jan 30, 2022 2:44 pm

Another example is prompts being used in the service of overly stingy answerlines, instead of just accepting things outright. Two that come to mind are the tossup on Japanese earthquakes that has a directed prompt for tsunamis, or the tossup on "text" using NLP clues which doesn't accept things like "natural language data". At that point, the player in my estimation has demonstrated sufficient knowledge of the answer to get points outright, and adding a directed prompt just makes more work for everybody. In particular, it seems like an antiprompt or a directed prompt could probably be replaced with outright acceptance a lot of the time.
As someone who does a modest amount of editing for Buzzword, where prompts do not exist and questions must be written in a way to avoid them, I agree with this, though I don't know how to quantify "a lot of the time" (10% of the time? 90%? somewhere in the middle?). There have been quite a few Buzzword questions where I've looked at a prompt and figured, you know what, this is good enough, if someone actually says this they're demonstrating sufficient knowledge of the answer, and just changed it to an accept. As far as I'm aware, it hasn't compromised the competitive integrity of any of the Buzzword events I've edited.
Billy Busse
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Fado Alexandrino
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Re: Your Long Answerlines Might be a Problem

Post by Fado Alexandrino »

I agree with all of Eric's points here.

The other thing I noticed with ACF regionals was that a lot of questions had notes in the answerline regarding the clues that were used. I did end up reading most of these notes to the players, but that added to the amount of answerline that I needed to parse. I think these notes are very valuable to a player who is reading the set afterwards or someone who wasn't at the tournament scrollbowling through the packets themselves, but for the reader at a tournament these notes add a lot of clutter to the already verbose answerlines. Maybe the notes can be added after the tournament before they are posted on the database.
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Mike Bentley
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Re: Your Long Answerlines Might be a Problem

Post by Mike Bentley »

One idea is to have notes appear as footnotes at the bottom of the page so they don't clutter the answer line.
Mike Bentley
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Adviser, Quizbowl Team at University of Washington
University of Maryland, Class of 2008
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