2024 ACF Regionals: Global Announcement (January 27)

[efleisig]

This is the official announcement for the 2024 edition of ACF Regionals, which will be held on January 27, 2024. The tournament is head edited by me, Eve Fleisig. This year’s subject editing team consists of:

Mitch McCullar (American & British Literature)
Eve Fleisig (European & World Literature, Linguistics, CS)
Will Alston (American History, Abrahamic Religion, Mythology, Painting/Sculpture)
Erik Christensen (European & Other History, Philosophy)
Ashish Subramanian (World History, Non-Abrahamic Religion, Other except Sports)
Shahar Schwartz (Biology, Chemistry)
Vincent Du (Physics, Other Science except Math and CS)
Kevin Ye (Math)
Chris Sims (Classical Music, Social Science except Linguistics)
Ganon Evans (Other Fine Arts)
Ryan Rosenberg (Sports)

Format
Mirrors of this tournament may be held in-person or online. If you have any questions about hosting, please email ACF’s Site Coordinator at [email protected].

Sites and Hosting
If your school would like to host a mirror of ACF Regionals, please submit a bid to host here. We are looking for hosts in the regions listed in the “Hosts” section below. If you have questions about hosting, please email ACF’s Site Coordinator, Tomás Aguilar-Fraga, at [email protected] and CC [email protected]. Hosts must abide by ACF’s Hosting Guidelines.

Hosts
Host sites will be updated here.

Northeast: MIT
Upstate NY: Cornell
Upper Mid-Atlantic: Rutgers
Lower Mid-Atlantic: James Madison
Southeast: Vanderbilt
Florida: University of Central Florida
Great Lakes: Ohio State
Upper Midwest: Purdue
Lower Midwest: University of Missouri - Columbia
North: University of Minnesota
South Central: UT Austin (online)
California: UC Berkeley
Northwest:
Eastern Canada: University of Ottawa
UK: Imperial
Online: University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Registration
Team registration: https://forms.gle/hmNjectpR518B9he8
Staffer registration: https://forms.gle/RGuCv7V3q3QUVkEB8
Site fields: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... 9-ap0/edit

Packet Submission
Any team that includes at least two people who played a regular, collegiate, academic quizbowl tournament* (either as a college student or as a high school student) prior to September 1, 2022 is required to submit a half-packet. If you are unsure whether your team is required to submit a half-packet, please email [email protected]. A team that is not required to submit a half-packet may submit an optional half-packet by the no-penalty deadline for a -$50 discount.

* For these purposes, all ACF tournaments, NAQT SCT (Division I or Division II), NAQT ICT, and typical college-level academic invitationals count as regular, collegiate, academic tournaments. Pop culture or “hybrid” tournaments, HCASC, and tournaments played on NAQT’s Collegiate Novice series sets do not.

If your team is obligated to submit a half-packet or wishes to submit an optional one, please email [email protected] by January 2, 2024 at the very latest to receive a half-packet distribution. Emailing to request a half-packet does not constitute registration for ACF Regionals; please be sure to also register with the official form.

In order to minimize the number of submissions that cannot be used for distributional reasons, half-packet assignments may ask for questions from specific subcategories. For instance, instead of being assigned an “American Literature” tossup, you might be asked to write a question on 20th-century American poetry, or a bonus on economics instead of “Social Science.”

Here is the half-packet submission schedule. All deadlines are 11:59 PM Pacific time.
October 25, 2023: -$75 discount
November 10, 2023: -$50 discount
November 25, 2023: -$25 discount
December 13, 2023: No discount given
December 27, 2023: +$25 penalty
January 3, 2024: +$50 penalty

After January 3, 2024, teams that submit late packets will be required to pay an additional $10 per day after the deadline. Teams that have not submitted a packet by January 13, 2024 will be dropped from the tournament, with no exceptions.

Packets Received
Half-packets will be updated here as they are received.

-$75
Cedarville A
Claremont A
Chicago M
Columbia A
Cornell A
Duke M
Georgia State A
Harvard A
JHU A
Sheffield A
Texas A&M B
Toronto A

-$50
JMU A
McGill A
Stanford B
Texas A&M A
UNC A
Virginia Tech A
Waterloo A
Waterloo B
Yale A
Yale B

-$25
ASU A
McGill B
Notre Dame A
Oxford A
Oxford B
South Carolina A
Toronto B
UBC A

-$0
Brandeis A
Cambridge A
Cambridge B
Dartmouth A
Durham A
Florida A
Florida B
Georgia Tech A
Georgia Tech B
Imperial B
Iowa A
Kentucky A
Liberty A
Maryland B
OSU A
Purdue A
Purdue B
Rutgers A
Stanford A
Tennessee A
Toronto C
Truman State A
Florida B
Florida C
UW A
WUSTL A
WUSTL B

+$25
Columbia B
Columbia C
CWRU A
Duke A
GWU A
Illinois A
Indiana A
UCF B
Warwick A
WUSTL C

+$50:
Chicago B
Chicago C
Maryland A
UNC B

Later packets:
UNC C (+$60)
Chicago D (+$80)
Penn A (+$80)
Iowa State A (+$90)
Edinburgh A (+$110)
Michigan A (+$130)
John Jay A (+$140)
RIT A (+$150)

Submission discounts and penalties—but not deadlines—may differ for teams attending sites outside of the United States. Please consult the announcement posts for such sites for details.

In order to meet a deadline, you must submit your half-packet to [email protected] by 11:59 PM Pacific time in Microsoft Word .doc or .docx format. Please do not submit packets as pdfs. The email subject line should list the name of the school, the team letter (if applicable), and the words “half-packet.”

If a team wishes to outsource part of its packet to a player who is not expected to play on that team (e.g. a student who has graduated), it must first receive approval from the head editor at [email protected]. Teams should email in their submissions separately and may not collaborate on packets; i.e. a school’s A team and B team should not write two half-packets together and should remain blind to one another’s packets. However, if anyone who works on a packet or has access to that packet ends up playing on a different team (e.g. if someone originally intended to be on a school’s B team instead plays for the A team) please inform the head editor and your site’s TD as soon as possible.

Fees
Fees and discounts for this tournament, other than packet submission discounts, are structured as follows:

Base fee per team: $150
New-to-quizbowl discount: -$100
Shorthanded discount (1-2 players): -$75
Staffers: -$25 per staffer with a functional laptop. Staffers must register with ACF in advance with this form and affirm that they have completed ACF’s moderator training. Staffers who have not completed the training may scorekeep.
Buzzer discount (per buzzer): -$10
Travel discount (per 200 miles traveled one-way): -$10

The new-to-quizbowl discount is intended for schools that did not send a team to any regular collegiate academic tournament (exclusively novice tournaments do not count) since September 2022, and which have no one on the team(s) claiming this discount who played those tournaments for another school.

Host sites will bill teams as soon as possible after the teams register. Teams should pay their host sites by whatever method is convenient for the hosts, who will in turn pay ACF by check, bank transfer, cash, or PayPal.

Distribution
The distribution for this tournament will follow the standard ACF distribution, as laid out here.

Question Guidelines
This tournament is intended to be similar in difficulty to 2023 ACF Regionals. Tossups will be capped at 800 characters and bonuses at 850 characters. However, you are free to write longer questions if you wish. Please do not write questions that are significantly shorter than the target length (i.e. tossups under six lines or bonuses in which each part is only one line). Half-packets should be formatted in 10-point Times New Roman with one-inch margins. Please do not add extraneous spacing or paragraph breaks between question text and answerlines. For answerlines, please bold and underline minimum acceptable answers and include the most likely answer first. Include diacritics in foreign words if applicable. For example:
ANSWER: Panama [or Republic of Panama or República de Panamá]

More information can be found in these question guidelines and in ACF’s packet submission guidelines.

Submissions that flout the length, difficulty, or formatting guidelines, or which include unoriginal material (e.g. plagiarized text or recycled questions from a previous set), will be sent back to teams and will be considered unsubmitted for the purposes of packet discounts.

If you would like to request an extension for your deadline, or if you have any further questions, please email [email protected].

[efleisig]

The deadline to submit hosting bids is this Saturday, November 18. If your school would like to host a mirror of ACF Regionals, please submit a bid to host here by then.

[Coach Jim]

I emailed [email protected] on Monday, Nov. 27 requesting a half packet distribution, but I haven't heard anything back. The deadline for submitting a half packet of questions with no penalty is only a few days away.

Again, my email address is: [email protected] . I would appreciate receiving a half packet distribution at your earliest convenience.

[Oscario]

I emailed [email protected] on Monday, Nov. 27 requesting a half packet distribution, but I haven't heard anything back. The deadline for submitting a half packet of questions with no penalty is only a few days away.

Again, my email address is: [email protected] . I would appreciate receiving a half packet distribution at your earliest convenience.

Same here

[efleisig]

Sincere apologies to both of you for the delay in sending out packets (I was very sick this week, and the delay is fully on me). You both should have now received half packet distributions.

[efleisig]

Due to this, the no penalty deadline for packet submissions has been extended to December 13.

[efleisig]

Currently confirmed host sites have been added above. Registration forms are now open:
Team registration: https://forms.gle/hmNjectpR518B9he8
Staffer registration: https://forms.gle/RGuCv7V3q3QUVkEB8

[roan089]

Is there any plan for an Online Overflow Mirror?

[efleisig]

Yes, the University of Nebraska - Lincoln plans to host an online mirror.

[efleisig]

Packets are available here: https://collegiate.quizbowlpackets.com/3107/
Detailed stats are available here: https://quizbowlstats.com/buzzpoints/se ... -regionals
Thanks to everyone who participated in this year's Regionals!