The Quizbowl Resource Center

The Brookwood Scholar's Invitational Bowl is once again seeking mirrors for the 2015-2016 school year. As last year, the set will be written and edited by members of the Georgia Tech Academic Team, and by guest Yellow Jacket Brady Weiler. For use of these questions, we will charge $10 per team that attends your tournament.

We will be producing 14 packets of 21 tossups and 20 bonuses. The distribution will be identical to last year's, namely:
4/4 Literature (1/1 American, 1/1 British, 1/1 European, 1/1 World Lit, Miscellaneous Common Links, or simply more from the other 3)
4/4 Science (1/1 Biology, 1/1 Chemistry, 1/1 Physics, 1/1 Other Science. Roughly half of the other science will be noncomputational mathematics, and the rest is split between astronomy, earth science, and computer science)
4/4 History (1/1 American, 1/1 World, 1/1 European, 1/1 More of the other three; Ancient History would go here)
3/3 Arts (1/1 Painting, 1/1 Compositional Music, 1/1 Other Arts)
2/2 RMP (1/1 Mythology, 0.5/0.5 Religion, 0.5/0.5 Philosophy)
1/1 Current Events, Politics, and Policy
1/1 Social Sciences and Miscellaneous Academic (with a strong emphasis on economics, political science, and psychology; there will be some PACE-style general knowledge questions to round out this distro, though probably not half-and-half)
0.5/0.5 Geography (focus on culturally-relevant clues)
0.5/0.5 Trash (popular culture and sports)

You can expect a pretty similar set to what we've put out in the past. The set will be done weeks ahead of the first mirror; question answerlines will not be overly difficult but the leadin material will be fresh; the science will involve a lot of words that are difficult to pronounce; there will be bad Kafka jokes. The last two BISBs on the archives should be a good reference. The set right now is about 25% written, so we should be on track to finish in early August like usual.

Tossups will be 5-6 lines in 10 TNR, and will be powermarked. The intended difficulty is the same as last year, or perhaps a slight smidgen easier. The set should be ready for mirroring by tournaments in mid-to-late September. Please contact me at adsilverman at bellsouth dot net if you're interested in mirroring, or post here.

List of mirrors to be updated here:
September 19, Germantown HS, Germantown, TN (contact Keith Mattix)
September 26/October at Enloe HS, Raleigh, NC (contact Celia Rowland)
October 10: Earlybird at UIUC, Champaign, IL (contact Tristan Willey)
October 24: California Cup 1, Varsity Division, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA (contact Ankit Aggarwal)
October 24: Rice University, Houston, TX (contact Amanda Pinchbeck)
November 1: University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY (contact Tyler Reid)
November 21: Brookwood HS, Lilburn, GA (home site)
December 12: Columbia College, Columbia, MO (contact Jeffrey Hill)
January 23: Columbia University, New York, NY (contact Ben Zhang)
January 23: Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA (contact Matt Fleischer)
March 12: Rancho Bernardo HS, San Diego, CA (contact Kion You)

This set is now 80% complete, so we are right on track to finish in early August. The questions will be extensively play-tested during August and early September as well.

We don't have too many interested mirrors this year compared to previous years. I encourage you, if you're hesitating on which set to choose to mirror, to contact me and we can provide writing samples. This is especially true for schools in the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic.

The set is completely written, edited, and packetized. We'll be working on playtesting it for the next few weeks. Still looking for mirrors, particularly in New England; shoot me an email if you're interested.

We've finished our last planned mirror for the semester. I'll leave this announcement up for another week or so in case anyone is still interested in planning a late-semester tournament, and if not, I'll submit the set to the archive.

Will this set be posted to the archive soon?

It appears to be up on the archive now.