2024 ACF Regionals: General Thanks

[efleisig]

I want to thank everyone who helped to make ACF Regionals happen this year. I've been thrilled not just with how the set turned out, but also with the creativity and effort that many wonderful people put into it:

Ashish put so much thought into his work and was exceptionally receptive to feedback, rewriting entire questions until they were just right. He also wrote great questions for other areas (e.g. king's horseman TU). I especially appreciated his approach to Other, curating a great selection of underasked topics.

Chris did a fantastic job with music and social science. He's got a great eye for spotting clues that reward real knowledge of the area while also being fun for non-specialists, and bringing in new content on interesting topics (e.g., music competitions).

Erik did a great job of finding unique and interesting takes across areas of history and philosophy (e.g., suits of armor) while also being a reliable and thoughtful editor from start to end.

Ganon swooped in to edit OFA, got everything together on a short timeline and wrote some wonderful questions (boots, powwows). I was especially impressed with his job as a first-time ACF opera editor, which has convinced me to go watch Pirates of Penzance.

Kevin brought a fresh perspective to math and contributed great freelance questions to CS and physics, as well as giving especially insightful feedback across science categories.

Mitch brought creativity and passion to American and British lit. I especially enjoyed his takes on pre-1800 British content: despite it often receiving less attention, he really delighted in it and wrote some especially fantastic questions on that period.

Ryan really epitomizes what I think good sports writing can look like in modern quizbowl, diversifying the topics and people asked about and writing enjoyable content for fans and non-fans alike.

Shahar was a head editor's dream for reliability: he got all his categories done early, with interesting content and creative answerlines, and gave excellent feedback on other science categories.

Vincent did a great job of writing elegant and enjoyable Physics + Other Science questions, with approachable answerlines across the vast range that Other Science has to cover.

Will took on an impressive number of categories and wrote great questions across multiple areas (e.g., mummies, Walker). He was proactive and generous with helping out other editors by giving feedback and spotting general set issues.

Advisors and proofreaders: Caroline gave some great lit feedback and freelanced a delightful tossup on fanfiction. Ophir was a star advisor and devoted proofreader who spotted some critical fixes at the eleventh hour. Jonathan, Hasna, Nick, and Matt generously lent their time and expertise to giving excellent advice on the set. Coby, Jacob, and JinAh were invaluable for proofreading.

I also subject edited World and European literature, CS, and linguistics for this set. For these categories, I'd like to shout-out some particularly interesting/well-written submissions: the Nardal sisters bonus (Chicago A), Uruguayan lit bonus (Claremont A), Dostoevsky TU (Waterloo A), odes TU (UNC C), noh bonus (Stanford A), Bengali TU (JHU A), Italian TU (-> Betrothed bonus, WUSTL B), BGP bonus (UF C), /i/ TU (-> bonus, Purdue B), ASL TU (Maryland B), Cosmicomics TU (WUSTL A), France TU (-> charterhouse, WUSTL A), and German TU (-> Romania, UNC). Special thanks to Ophir for great feedback on linguistics early on that made me rethink the approach to those questions and made the category much stronger overall.

This set wouldn't be possible without our amazing playtesters: thank you all for giving us your feedback on the set! Many thanks as well to the TDs and staffers who made playing the set possible. Finally, thank you to the players, the reason we keep writing. I really hope you enjoyed this year's ACF Regionals!

I invite subject editors, players, and anyone associated with the set to share their thoughts below.

[naan/steak-holding toll]

Had a blast working on this set. I'd like to thank Eve first and foremost for being - in addition to a great editor in general and thoughtful commenter with a lot of actionable suggestions - a proactive head editor and project manager who kept all of us on track and did regular check-ins with the various editors. Many quizbowl projects end up in last minute scrambles; this one decidedly did not and she deserves substantial credit for this.

Besides the folks credited above, I'd like to also thank our playtesters. I'd especially like to thank Eric Mukherjee, John Lawrence, Stephen Liu, and Chandler West, who all did private playtesting with me and are good teammates and friends who helped guide several questions in better directions and affirmed my general approach to the tournament.

[Shahar S.]

Before I get into specifics, I want to say thanks to the whole team who worked on regionals this year. This was my first time editing a collegiate set (let alone an ACF set), and so far this has been the smoothest experience working on any quizbowl project so far. A lot of praise goes to Eve for this both for helping all of us reign in our questions when needed and for keeping us on track while supporting some of our crazier ideas. On top of that, this set had a ton of very experienced editors who were all extremely respectful of other opinions and criticisms, even when it was coming from someone without as much expertise (like me). I think this acceptance and willingness to fix problems was a big part of the reason why the set was received well (at least from what I’ve heard so far). Because we were all so willing to listen to each other, our questions across the board were able to become the best versions of what they could be, so huge thanks to everyone for facilitating that environment.

Because I worked on biology and chemistry, I was in a bit of a weird spot because there are way fewer people on the set with expertise on those categories than basically anywhere else. Because of that, I want to specifically shout out Ashish and Vincent, who were invaluable sources of feedback for biology and chemistry, respectively. They actively chose to give suggestions, expertise, and encouragement, without which I’m certain that the set would not have been as successful. I also want to send a quick shoutout to Will for being willing to playtest my stuff even though he doesn’t have a ton of experience in my categories. I’m a firm believer that understanding how non-experts play on science subcategories should be a bigger priority, so I appreciate when people are willing to take a crack at it knowing it’s not their strength. Thank you to everyone who sat in on the (very long and late) biology/chem playtesting sessions as well. As I mentioned earlier feedback for biology and chemistry is hard to come by so those sessions were really critical in helping me get the questions I was responsible for to where they needed to be.

We had a lot of interesting questions come in. Some of my favorite creative submission ideas were survival (from South Carolina A), sea stars (“Geodesic” State), transcription factors (WUSTL A), the sexy son hypothesis bonus (Florida B), Binding (Stanford A), and the astro geochemistry bonus (also Florida B). Shoutout also to Sperm (Claremont), “4” (Columbia B), the water gas shift bonus (Waterloo A), and the Gabriel synthesis bonus (WUSTL A) for being basically perfect on submission without need for almost any edits. Finally, thanks to the crazy ideas that didn’t quite match what we were going for but were clever enough to spawn entirely new questions (looking specifically at “serum protein electrophoresis” from Virginia Tech and “NADPH” from Cornell A).

From what I understand, it seemed like people really enjoyed the science this year, so everyone’s help was not in vain (at least I think people liked it based on what I’ve been told so far… I’m using this as a template of how I want to approach editing projects in the future so please feel free to reach out or post if it wasn’t your cup of tea). I might make a more detailed post later on the other thread about my overarching editing philosophy, but I haven't committed to anything yet. Still, thanks to everyone, I had a blast

[vydu]

I want to echo everyone’s praise of Eve, and thank her for being especially understanding when I fell behind early on in the process. Shahar was a very swell science co-editor, cheerily giving lots of feedback, accurately dunking on some of my worse difficulty impulses (circularly-polarized light was originally a tossup…would not have gone well), and just being a model of productivity. I learned a bunch from the very cool questions he wrote on more applied/engineering topics, like cooling in metallurgy and nanoparticles. Thanks to Will for playtesting almost every one of my questions, and offering lots of useful playability and difficulty suggestions. Thanks to Ashish and Kevin for being great sounding boards for questions and for lots of conversations about difficulty and writing philosophy, often very late at night. Thank you to everyone who playtested the physics/astro/earth sci — Eric Mukherjee, Iain Carpenter, Dan Ni, Jason Golfinos, Evan Knox, Coby Tran (special shoutout to Eric and Iain for sitting in on both sessions).

I received tons of really cool submissions. I want to shoutout Truman State, Claremont, and Waterloo A’s submissions for having great subs in both physics and osci that needed minimal editing. Submissions that made it in that I enjoyed reading include JHU A’s sub on the solid mechanics of the wasp ovipositor, Cedarville’s bonus on cones in civil engineering (which was included the concrete tossup), Columbia A’s bonus on intermediate-mass black holes, UNC A’s tossup on iron fertilization, Waterloo A’s tossup on exciting new experiments involving xenon, Yale B’s bonus on natural quasicrystals, Waterloo B’s tossup on near-IR sensing, ASU’s tossup on the logarithm in stat mech, and Columbia C’s tossup on applications of laminar flow, UF C’s tossup on liquid crystals, and WUSTL B’s sub on devices using quantum tunneling.

I think I was a little heavy-handed in terms of picking which ones to use to satisfy a sub-distribution, but reading the packet submission discussions recently has definitely made me re-evaluate. So, apologies to all the teams who wrote very good submissions that didn’t make it in due to me over-distributing. Among the ones that didn’t make it in but I still greatly enjoyed reading: Stanford B’s bonus on tree-climbing goats; Purdue B’s tossup on anoxic environments; Columbia C’s bonus on weather prediction; Cambridge B’s tossup on the Sagittarius galaxy, GT B’s submission on coriolis forces; Dartmouth A’s sub on the island of stability in nuclear physics, VT’s bonus on Venus, Indiana A’s bonus on the effects of ruminant belching on the climate, UNC B’s tossup on quantum decoherence, GT A’s tossup on measuring the speed of light, OSU A’s bonus on the Poiseuille equation. Shoutout as well to all the teams that submitted questions on quantum gravity and the Dirac equation — there were quite a few of you!

[cwasims]

Thanks from my end are due to many people; Eve, for doing an admirable job of keeping everyone on track to avoid a last-minute rush and providing great feedback; the other subject editors, for their helpful thoughts and suggestions, aided greatly by the nifty new playtesting Discord app developed by Jordan; and the playtesters and proofreaders for improving the content and structure of many questions - especially John Lawrence, Jacob Egol, Ophir Lifshitz, Walter Zhou, Sameer Apte, Nick Jensen, Jason Golfinos, and Evan Knox.

For classical music, I took basically a very similar approach to how I've handled the subject in previous sets: a generally "score-focused" approach that emphasizes deeper cuts on the most widely-performed works as opposed to content about less central composers in the canon. There is always a balance to be struck, though, and hopefully the piano competitions satisfied people's urge for more anecdote-y clues and the tossup on roses touching a variety of less-clued composers. There were several good submissions that I ended up using: there were tossups on Mozart string quartets (Rutgers A) and Khachaturian (Purdue B), and bonuses on Hugo Wolf (Cornell A), Scriabin's (supposed) synesthesia (Virginia Tech), Bach's The Musical Offering (Waterloo A), César Cui (Toronto B), Dora Pejačević (WUSTL A), paintings that were inspirations for pieces of classical music (U. Washington A), and a bonus on Bernstein's musical inspirations (Stanford B). Some other good submission that ended up unused for various reasons included Waterloo B's tossup on Faust in music, Yale A's bonus on Busoni, Imperial B's bonus on cadenzas, and Maryland B's tossup on Villa-Lobos.
If anyone is interested, I created a Spotify playlist of the music clued here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/07XE1 ... f31b4f495f

Social science has the challenge of a vast quantity of academic material and a relatively paucity of subject experts in field. As I alluded to in my post about detailed stats, my lead-ins tended to play hard while the middle clues seemed to attract a good number of buzzes. For many of the answer lines, I'm not necessarily sure what other cluing choices would have helped this situation considerably without veering too much into other categories; this is something to think about more in future. At the Regionals level especially, I think the answer space for social science broadens considerably and I hope people enjoyed some of the more unorthodox ideas. Economics and psychology were purposefully overrepresented; these are the two most-studied social sciences in the academy and the ones whose ideas I think have the broadest impact. As in classical music, bonuses are more represented among submissions I used, which were tossups on agriculture in the Neolithic Revolution (JMU A), Amartya Sen (Purdue A), and heterosexuality (OSU A), and bonuses on experimental economics (Cornell A), autism (Waterloo A), Bourdieu (Oxford B), LIBOR (Toronto B), and love (South Carolina A). Thanks to Ashish for the tossup on Hispanics in health and bonus on Michael Taussig, and to Vincent for the tossup on utility. Other good submissions included JHU A's tossup on Zora Neale Hurston's anthropology, Cambridge A's tossup on Samuel Huntington, Imperial B's bonus on John Von Neumann, Truman State A's tossup on Carl Rogers, and WUSTL B's bonus on milieu therapy.

I hope everyone enjoyed playing the set, I had a lot of fun editing it! Please let me know if you have any feedback on my categories or on your submissions.

[ErikC]

I want to second (or third?) the praise for Eve as a head editor for steering the ship and keeping us on time and producing a final product that seemed to be well-received and hit the target demo. She kept a steady eye on the set and kept up production early on and made the process clear for first-time ACF editors like myself. Fellow subject editors were also helpful in gauging difficulty and providing initial feedback right at the start that helped develop a lot of ideas that started out as something quite different.

I heavily appreciate the help from playtesters - many were mentioned here, but I'll add Henry Atkins, Kevin Thomas, Abigail Tan, and Jordan Brownstein for their feedback and suggestions. Jordan's playtesting app was also very cool and made playing posted questions much more fun. I also appreciate the valuable suggestions from Matt Bollinger and Jinah Kim outside of playtesting.

Special thanks to Ophir for his thoroughness in proofreading, particularly finding a certain mistake shortly before the mirrors began. Jonathan Magin also provided valuable suggestions to improve clarity and difficulty calibration.

I appreciated the submissions like medieval universities, black in pre World-War I European history, and medicine in Egyptian history that chose a less common answerline and offered a fresh outlook on a period. I also received good submissions in philosophy, with the well-clued Daniel Dennett tossup and a novel tossup on Bayes in philosophy standing out.

A shout out (and call out, in a thinly veiled attempt to ascend the haters list) to Ganon, who I thought I had managed to escape being on a team with until he joined the set later on.