HFT XIV Available for Mirrors (2019-20)

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AGoodMan
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HFT XIV Available for Mirrors (2019-20)

Post by AGoodMan »

Hello everyone, Harvard Quiz Bowl is excited to announce the 14th edition of the Harvard Fall Tournament set, HFT XIV. The set will be available for mirrors from 11/9/2019 to the Sunday before the 2020 HSNCT.

Production Details
Jon Suh will be head-editing the set, including the history, religion, and myth. Michael Yue will be the classical music and jazz editor and Ricky Li will be the literature editor. The questions will be written by myself, Michael Yue, Ricky Li, Kelvin Li, Justin Duffy, Thomas Gioia, and the rest of the Harvard team. Jordan Brownstein will serve as an external consultant for question feedback and difficulty control. As of today (6/14/2019), we have written roughly 25% of the set.

Set Details
HFT is a high school regular-plus difficulty housewrite. According to Groger Ranks, last year's HFT XIII's power adjustment was 2.96 and PPB adjustment was 1.64. (The reference set was NAQT's IS-177 set; IS sets are deemed to be the standard for high school "regular" difficulty and are thus scored a 0. The less generous a set's powermarking is or the harder a set's bonuses are, the higher the adjustment scores.) We plan to keep bonus difficulty around the same (meaning in the 1.5-2.0 PPB adjustment range), while making the set a little bit easier to power (2.0-2.5).

The set will consist of 15 power-marked rounds: 13 regular-plus difficulty rounds, and 2 harder difficulty rounds intended for Finals that may approach HSNCT-level difficulty. All tossups will be 6-7 lines of 10 point Times New Roman font including powermarking. A tiebreaker tossup and bonus question from the Big Three (literature/science/history) will be provided with each round.

Note that we are still including 2 rounds of harder difficulty questions intended for Finals. However, we do not require any mirrors to use the Finals questions in their tournaments. We believe 13 rounds of non-finals difficulty questions are generally enough to ensure that mirrors can be run without needing to use the Finals questions if they do not desire to do so, while also offering mirrors that want to use the Finals questions that option as well.

Distribution
The distribution is unchanged from last year, and is the following:

4/4 Literature (1/1 American, 1/1 European, 1/1 British, 1/1 World/Ancient/Miscellaneous)
4/4 Science (1/1 Biology, 1/1 Chemistry, 1/1 Physics, 1/1 Math/CS/Earth Science/Astronomy/Other)
4/4 History (1/1 American, 1/1 World, 2/2 European/British/Ancient)
3/3 Fine Arts (1/1 Painting/Sculpture, 1/1 Classical Music, 1/1 Other Arts)
1/1 Social Science/Philosophy
1/1 Religion
1/1 Mythology
1/1 Geography/Modern World
1/1 Popular Culture

Like previous years, we will tweak some of the subdistributions to emphasize certain topics appropriate for high school, while de-emphasizing others that are less appropriate for high school. Popular culture questions will also aim to be more culturally relevant and less "trashy."

Mirrors: A couple policies are new this year.
The mirror fee will be $10 per team at the mirror site, and can be negotiated for special considerations like very low/high attendance, etc. This negotiability is completely at our discretion and is in no way set in stone. If there is more than one mirror request for the same geographical region, mirrors will be awarded based on attendance size, quality/consistency of program, and first-come first-serve (not in any particular order).

If you are interested in mirroring HFT XIV or have any questions about it, please contact the club at [email protected]. At the end of the mirror period, we will upload the set, hopefully in time for teams to use as practice material for the 2020 high school nationals tournaments.

NEW POLICY: Mirror hosts that fail to respond to any communication within 2 months of us sending an invoice will incur a 10% penalty for each additional week of noncommunication, rounded up to the next full week.

Set Access
Teams that attended mirrors should ONLY request access to electronic copies of the set by emailing the club at [email protected]. Please only discuss set content on the private discussion forum that will be created.

Final Comments
Thank you for mirroring HFT, and we are excited to bring yet another high-quality set this year.

Best,
Jon & Ricky, Co-Presidents
Last edited by AGoodMan on Sat Nov 09, 2019 4:00 pm, edited 7 times in total.
Jon Suh
Wheaton Warrenville South High School '16
Harvard '20
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AGoodMan
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Re: HFT XIV Available for Mirrors (2019-20)

Post by AGoodMan »

Mirror List
11/9/19: Triton Fall (UCSD) (San Diego, CA)
11/9/19: TQBA mirror (Texas)
11/16/19: HFT Main Site (Cambridge, MA)
11/23/19: MOQBA Fall Championship at Columbia College (Columbia, MO)
11/23/19: Michigan State University mirror (Michigan)
12/7/19: Rockford Auburn mirror (Rockford, IL)
12/14/19: Arizona State University mirror
1/18/20: Barron Robinson Memorial tournament (Springfield, IL)
2/16/20: Solon High School mirror (Solon, OH)
2/23/20: RM Spring at Richard Montgomery High School (Rockville, MD)
2/29/20: California Cup #3
2/29/20: NYU mirror (New York City)
[CANCELLED]: Grapes of Smath at NCSSM (Durham, NC)
[CANCELLED]: Mannheim Township mirror
5/23/20 CLOSED online mirror
Jon Suh
Wheaton Warrenville South High School '16
Harvard '20
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AGoodMan
Rikku
Posts: 372
Joined: Sat Dec 20, 2014 10:25 pm

Re: HFT XIV Available for Mirrors (2019-20)

Post by AGoodMan »

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all remaining physical mirrors of the set have been cancelled. Instead, we are hosting a closed Discord mirror on May 23, the original planned date of HSNCT. Teams who were planning on playing the set are encouraged to register.
Jon Suh
Wheaton Warrenville South High School '16
Harvard '20
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