Immediate Corrections to Answers

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cchiego
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Immediate Corrections to Answers

Post by cchiego »

Reading at the NSC this year was the first time that I encountered the "immediate correction" rule for answers (Rule H.2 in PACE's official rules). This rule is a bad idea and in light of rumors that this might be spreading to other formats, I thought I'd explain how this rule ended up playing out in practice and why it's frustrating to both readers and players.

I rarely saw an actual "immediate" correction of "misspeaking" of the kind indicated in the PACE rules and instead saw multiple instances where borderline situations left a bad taste in peoples' mouths. In general, the problem from the moderator's point of view is that many of these answerlines have multiple alternative answers that take a second for the reader to look through and determine if an answer given by the player is correct. When you're dealing with the correctness of just one answer, that's fine, but when you have multiple potential answers things start to get confusing for everyone.

Here's how it played out in practice:

Scenario 1:

Player says an incorrect answer, moderator looks down at the list of alternative answers/instructions to try to see if it's acceptable, player then says the correct answer. Player is ruled incorrect after moderator reads the answer list and finds that the initial answer was unacceptable and the moderator deemed there was a long enough pause between the player giving the answers. Player complains that the player corrected the answer within the given amount of time and that the moderator was too distracted by reading the answerline to note whether or not the player "paused."

Scenario 2:

Player says most of an incorrect answer, but draws out the final bit of the answer to try to elicit a reaction from the moderator. If the moderator does not give a reaction (as the moderator is looking down at the answerline to try to see if it's correct or not), the player then says the correct answer. Moderator rules the player incorrect on the basis of the player stalling after giving an an incorrect answer. Player complains that since the correction was "immediate" after the first answer finished, the moderator should have accepted it.

Scenario 3:

Player says one answer, then says another answer, then another answer, then comes up with the correct answer (immediately after each other). This often came towards the end of time on a bonus, so it became a judgment call on behalf of the reader as to when time expired and after what answer exactly. Again, this occurs as the reader is looking down trying to see if an answer is correct or not while the player is adding more answers to consider. Moderator rules the player incorrect as time expired after the player had only given an incorrect answer (I think on one occasion there was an incorrect, a correct, then another incorrect answer!), but the player complains that the moderator did not call time out loud at the time and/or should have asked the captain for the answer.

This seems unduly frustrating for both moderators and players. From what I've seen, there's nothing wrong with the "completed at least one word" rule that NAQT rules use and it's much easier as a reader to clearly know what answer the player is giving instead of tasking the reader with adjudicating between the correctness of multiple potential answers while trying to also keep track of the time left for the response and the presence of a "pause" between answers. I hope that this rule gets changed back to the standard completing-one-word rule and that other formats stick to the "completed at least one word" of an answer rule.
Chris C.
Past: UGA/UCSD/Penn
Present: Solano County, CA
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Captain Sinico
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Re: Immediate Corrections to Answers

Post by Captain Sinico »

I have to agree with Chris - allowing corrections to completed answers isn't a good idea in practice and we should change that rule to something more straightforward.
Mike Sorice
Former Coach, Centennial High School of Champaign, IL (2014-2020) & Team Illinois (2016-2018)
Alumnus, Illinois ABT (2000-2002; 2003-2009) & Fenwick Scholastic Bowl (1999-2000)
Member, ACF (Emeritus), IHSSBCA, & PACE
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