The Quizbowl Resource Center

Hello, my name is Charles Hang, and I am pleased to announce the formation of Olympia Academic Competition Questions, a company dedicated to producing high quality Quiz Bowl questions, especially at the Middle School level.

Our Mission

Our mission is the produce the highest quality Quiz Bowl questions possible in terms of pyramidality, academic relevance, and accessibility. For more information regarding our mission, please visit us at http://www.olympiaquestions.com/what-se ... apart.html

Our Products

We are pleased to announce that for the 2010-2011 competition season, we will be producing two middle school question sets in a twenty tossup, twenty bonus format based upon that of the Academic Competition Federation. We will also be producing sets sharing questions with those sets for the IESA and GATA formats, and are open to custom orders.The first of our sets will be available starting October 31st.

We also offer a number of older sets which can be used either as tournament or practice questions.

For more information regarding our products, please visit our website at www.olympiaquestions.com/products.html

Our Team

We are also pleased to announce that Douglas Graebner and Ikshu Neithaleth will be serving as question writers for Olympia. We are also interested in hiring additional writers, as well as a dedicated assistant editor/proofreader, so if you are interested in joining us, please visit our website at www.olympiaquestions.com/joining-us.html

Additional Questions

If you have any further questions, please check out our Frequently Asked Questions at www.olympiaquestions.com/contact-us.html, or email us at [email protected].

Good luck, though OACQ is an unfortunate acronym . . .

David Riley wrote:Good luck, though OACQ is an unfortunate acronym . . .

Thank you, though I have to admit, I'm not sure what you're alluding to. Unless you're just saying it's hard to pronounce, in which case the shorthand we've been using internally is just "Olympia."

Most likely he's referring to DACQ.

Maybe sharing 3 letters with OAC too.

Crazy Andy Watkins wrote:Most likely he's referring to DACQ.

Yeah, I thought of that, but the naming scheme was good and in any case, I don't think we'll have the same issues with completing tournaments, especially given our writing structure.

jonah wrote:Maybe sharing 3 letters with OAC too.

I also thought of this, but we don't really emphasize the acronym.

Jonah wins the prize, but Missouri's so far from Columbus that hopefully nobody wil catch it.

Is there a reason why your "ACF Format Sets" do not, in fact, use the (m)ACF distribution? There seems to be no distribution for Philosophy or Social Science, and 2/2 General Knowledge combined with 1/1 Current Events seems a bit much. 1/1 Math seems a lot, too. I'm curious, too, as to whether the .5/.5 "Am. Government" will be more historical or political science, and I think it's odd that 2/2 of the 4/4 "Social Studies" is American. Are you just using "ACF Format" to mean 20/20?

Lots of "ACF format" sets don't use the ACF distribution, and there is no standard mACF distribution, so I see nothing wrong with the nomenclature. Middle school quizbowl simply cannot use even the high school distribution, or it will by default be too hard.

Jeremy Gibbs Freesy Does It wrote:Lots of "ACF format" sets don't use the ACF distribution, and there is no standard mACF distribution, so I see nothing wrong with the nomenclature. Middle school quizbowl simply cannot use even the high school distribution, or it will by default be too hard.

Everything makes a whole lot more sense now that I realize these are for middle school.

AlphaQuizBowler wrote:Is there a reason why your "ACF Format Sets" do not, in fact, use the (m)ACF distribution? There seems to be no distribution for Philosophy or Social Science, and 2/2 General Knowledge combined with 1/1 Current Events seems a bit much. 1/1 Math seems a lot, too. I'm curious, too, as to whether the .5/.5 "Am. Government" will be more historical or political science, and I think it's odd that 2/2 of the 4/4 "Social Studies" is American. Are you just using "ACF Format" to mean 20/20?

To answer your specific concerns, there isn't enough of a philosophy & social science canon at the middle school level to fill 1/1 (never mind about the 2/2 the actual ACF distribution gives), so those subjects are bundled with other academic topics in the 1/1 "Other Academic" part of General Knowledge. 1/1 Math reflects the emphasis on math at the middle school level, and 0.5/0.5 Am. Government is the same American Government in last year's CMST--essentially, governmental concepts and institutions. The heavy emphasis on American topics under "Social Studies" also reflects the reality of what middle schoolers know.

By the way, I wanted to mention that the deadline for writer applications is December 1st, 2010. We will send emails to those writers we accept by December 5th.

Just wanted to mention that the deadline to apply to write for Olympia is in five days, so if you're interested, I look forward to seeing your applications soon.

(By the way, we're especially interested in people who can write math--both noncomputational and computational, but particularly the former--and music)

Olympia Academic Competition Questions is proud to announce that Dallin Kelson and Nicholas Neuteufel will be joining us as full writers. In addition, Charles Martin will be serving as a copy editor. We are proud to have Dallin, Nicholas, and Charles join us, and look forward to working with them in our future endeavors.

For more information, please see the news portion of our website.

We are pleased to announce that Robert Dorigo Jones will be joining Olympia as an associate writer. Robert is a member of the team at Detroit Catholic Central High School, and is the head editor of the DCC Academic Tournament.

More information regarding Olympia's team of writers can be found here.

First of all, we are pleased to announce that Robert Lawson will be joining our team of writers at Olympia. Robert is a Junior at Paul M. Dorman High School, where he is a member of the Academic Team. Robert was a writer and editor for Dorman's 2011 Cavalier Academic Challenge.

However, we are also sorry to announce that Charles Martin will be leaving us as a copy editor due to other commitments. Thus, we are searching for a copy editor to proofread our sets as well as help in their assembly. For more information regarding the copy editing position, please see our website at http://www.olympiaquestions.com/joining-us.html. If you are interested, please email us at [email protected].

Furthermore, we are currently looking for writers to write science and math questions. If you feel that you can write science and/or math at the middle school level and would like to join us, please visit our website here or email us at [email protected].

Finally, an updated list of tournaments using our questions can be found on our website at http://www.olympiaquestions.com/tournam ... tions.html. We are happy to announce that our questions have already been used in tournaments in four states including Illinois, Kansas, and New York, and that we have received inquiries from several more. For more information regarding our questions, please visit the our website here.