GSAC XVII Discussion

[Blackboard Monitor Vimes]

Since we've had no additional interest in the set and it seems extremely unlikely that at this late a date we would, I've sent the revised version of the set to George for posting and am finally opening this thread. Apologies for not doing so a week ago when I initially said I would, but APs resulted in me being significantly more harried this week than I expected.

About the set: There was no head editor for this tournament, which in retrospect was probably a mistake (I say "probably" because I doubt that any of us would have actually had time to act as head editor given the way things worked out, but that's a moot point). I apologize for the lack of cohesion this created in the original set; we all ended up with somewhat different visions of what we wanted this set to be. It's my understanding that Tommy and JR are addressing this issue for next year's tournament.

I edited literature, trash/CE, visual art, and myth, Greg Tito edited biology, religion, geography, and history, and Tommy Casalaspi edited social science, music, and philosophy. Many thanks to Mehdi Razvi for stepping in to edit non-biological science when it became clear that we could not handle this internally with an acceptable degree of competence.

Thanks also to Charlie Dees and his teammates for looking over the set to help us identify changes that should be made before the set was mirrored. We had a number of these things in mind already, but another set of eyes and opinions and a specific location within packets so that we only had to make changes rather than track down individual questions were extremely helpful. Thanks to Missouri and NIU for hosting mirrors, as well as to the staff of the main site and mirrors and the teams who came out to play this tournament.

[Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN)]

Because my team ran a tournament using this set, I went through all of the scoresheets and counted up the rates at which different tossups were being answered. To give people a better idea of the field, our statistics are here - http://www.missouriquizbowl.com/reports ... dings.html. Helias is a rather experienced team, who I believe was missing one important player (they went on to put up 16.5 ppb and win NAQT state), but my impression of many of the teams is that they were not especially active, or else had newer players on them, so they are probably a pretty good sample size if you want to measure what it is lower level teams know. Here is the list of tossups that went dead or were only answered in one room out of four:

Dead Tossups

Ottorino Respighi, Angular momentum, Girolamo Savonarola, Colligative properties, Nadine Gordimer, O.A.R., Luigi Pirandello, J.M. Coatzee, FIllipo Brunelleschi, Michelson-Morley experiment, Great Northern War, Manuel de Falla, Emile Durkheim, Hedda Gabler, Snell’s law, Orange River, Arnold Schoenberg, Bertold Brecht, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Variable star, Franz Boas, Marduk, Charles Ives, Samuel Beckett, 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, Michel Foucault, Simple harmonic oscillator

Tossups with only 1 correct response

Sonny the Cuckoo Bird, Gamal Abdel Nasser, The Tin Drum, Indo-European, The RaMBam, Evelyn Waugh, Erik Erikson, Emma, Huldrych Zwingli, Jainism, Rococo, John Donne, Georges Bizet, Founder effect, Franz Schubert, Hess’s law, Ethan Frome, Jean Piaget, Jacques-Louis David, David Hume, Fleetwood Mac, Alfred Tennyson, Noam Chomsky, Atalanta, The Satanic Verses, Aeschylus, Hadith, Henry Purcell, Committee of Public Safety, Soren Kierkegaard, The Brothers Karamazov, 1st Punic war, The Raft of the Medusa, Virginia Woolf, Khmer Empire, Akira Kurosawa, galvanic cell, Rafael Trujillo, Aristophanes, Francis of Assisi, Umberto Eco, Bellerophon

I think more of these kinds of statistics should be compiled, since they can keep us in touch with what it is less experienced teams know, so I would wholeheartedly recommend other hosts do the same.

[Unicolored Jay]

1 team got Georges Bizet? Wow, that's interesting...considering Carmen is like the most-asked about opera out there.

[FlamingPiWalrusWizard]

Prufrock went dead???????????
PRUFROCKKKKKKKKKKK???????

[Down and out in Quintana Roo]

Ottorino Respighi, O.A.R., Great Northern War, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Tossups with only 1 correct response

The RaMBam, Khmer Empire, Rafael Trujillo

Those tossups are just way too hard and should not be regular high school answers.

Girolamo Savonarola, Manuel de Falla, Michel Foucault

Tossups with only 1 correct response

Evelyn Waugh, Hadith, Henry Purcell, Akira Kurosawa, galvanic cell

Those tossups are still too hard but i would tolerate as answers.

[Kanye West]

1 team got Georges Bizet? Wow, that's interesting...considering Carmen is like the most-asked about opera out there.

my impression of many of the teams is that they were not especially active, or else had newer players on them

[Nick]

Firstly, I think its great that Charlie did this because it really puts difficulty in a much more objective perspective than somebody's opinion.

Also I want to mention that I've attended more than one GSAC tournament and for the top teams it was a regular highlight in the season and I doubt this year and this set was any different. I should also acknowledge that the sample size for this tournament is small and certainly susceptible to bias/error.

If I'm reading this correctly, however, it seems there are a few things we can make out from these lists:

(for the purposes of the following, I'm going to assume that if a tossup is on one of the lists above, it's "too hard" for the field. Feel free to debate this assumption)

Literature seems significantly more difficult for teams than Science or History. Science and History have, respectively, 9 and 8 tossups on these lists, which I belive means that on average, during each of the 8-9 rounds played throughout the tournament, about 1 of the 4 Sci and History tossups were too hard (which I think is a decent conversion, since as we all know, you can never have a perfect set). Literature, however, has 20 tossups. Which means more than half of all literature tossups were too hard for the field. I think we know a lot of reasons for this, but it might be important to reiterate and keep in mind when writing, since although a lot of the lit answers on these lists seem legit and "canonical" are still just very (and disproportionately) unfamiliar to lower level teams.

On a similiar note- Arts has 12 tossups on the list, which means that because Arts is 2 tossups a game, more than half of all Arts questions were too hard. The real kicker, however, goes to Social Science- which has 8. If Social Science is 1 question per game, this means that virtually every single social science tossup was too hard for the field.

I get the fact that these are younger/newer teams, but those numbers seem a little high. And to think that this was the "easy" version of the set? The highest bonus conversion was around 11. Again, I'm not saying that we can't expect the BC to be lower b/c these are newer teams but in all seriousness, what is the point of using the "hard" bonus part if these are the numbers?

Just some things to think about....

[dxdtdemon]

Charlie, it seems that most of the bagelled science tossups in both this set and the HSAPQ set that you wrote about in another thread were physics tossups. Were most of the competitors at the two tournaments that you give data for young enough that they hadn't yet taken physics given when most Missouri students typically take that subject?

[Charbroil]

Charlie, it seems that most of the bagelled science tossups in both this set and the HSAPQ set that you wrote about in another thread were physics tossups. Were most of the competitors at the two tournaments that you give data for young enough that they hadn't yet taken physics given when most Missouri students typically take that subject?

Charlie can obviously describe the field at his own tournament better than I can, but it's worth noting that many of the listed Physics topics only come up fairly late during an AP level course, if at all. Thus, I think it's more an issue of the appropriateness of writing a tossup on, say, variable stars (which I've only heard of in Quiz Bowl and outside reading despite two years of high school Physics and a full year of college Physics) rather than an issue of the field's youth.

[Unicolored Jay]

1 team got Georges Bizet? Wow, that's interesting...considering Carmen is like the most-asked about opera out there.

my impression of many of the teams is that they were not especially active, or else had newer players on them

That's true, but Bizet should be much, much easier than Ives, de Falla, Purcell, and Respighi, all of which were missed more or as much.

I think social science is one of the hardest subjects for new teams to answer on-other than some classes taught usually to upperclassmen there really isn't much out there that can be learned from school. Well, at least in my experiences.

[Whiter Hydra]

Thus, I think it's more an issue of the appropriateness of writing a tossup on, say, variable stars (which I've only heard of in Quiz Bowl and outside reading despite two years of high school Physics and a full year of college Physics) rather than an issue of the field's youth.

You aren't going to find much of a mention of variable stars in physics, contsidering that it's a topic in astronomy (and it's not that advanced a concept either).

[Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN)]

Yeah, but how many high schools offer basic astronomy classes? What other context would most high schoolers have to learn these things?

[kayli]

Astronomy isn't taught a lot in high school even at really good schools. For example, the only astronomy I ever got and will ever have in high school was in a 9th grade FCAT science course; and I don't think that's very different for many other schools. I think overall astronomy tossups should be kept to a minimum and go by the modern easy answer space model of questions.

[Whiter Hydra]

Yeah, but how many high schools offer basic astronomy classes? What other context would most high schoolers have to learn these things?

I doubt a ton of schools have a "History of Art" class either, and yet we ask a lot of art questions.

Also, my main point was that you wouldn't find variable stars in a physics textbook because it is not physics.

[Charbroil]

Yeah, but how many high schools offer basic astronomy classes? What other context would most high schoolers have to learn these things?

I doubt a ton of schools have a "History of Art" class either, and yet we ask a lot of art questions.

Also, my main point was that you wouldn't find variable stars in a physics textbook because it is not physics.

Most schools cover some degree of art history--especially given that Art History is an AP course. In contrast, I doubt most schools cover astronomy outside of a surface examination of Earth Science. Certainly, I don't think variable stars is a topic which meets the 90% conversion target that tossups are supposed to have.

[Terrible Shorts Depot]

Yeah, but how many high schools offer basic astronomy classes? What other context would most high schoolers have to learn these things?

I doubt a ton of schools have a "History of Art" class either, and yet we ask a lot of art questions.

Also, my main point was that you wouldn't find variable stars in a physics textbook because it is not physics.

Most schools cover some degree of art history--especially given that Art History is an AP course. In contrast, I doubt most schools cover astronomy outside of a surface examination of Earth Science. Certainly, I don't think variable stars is a topic which meets the 90% conversion target that tossups are supposed to have.

Science Olympiad is pretty popular and that'll teach you about variable stars.

[Unicolored Jay]

Yeah, but how many high schools offer basic astronomy classes? What other context would most high schoolers have to learn these things?

I doubt a ton of schools have a "History of Art" class either, and yet we ask a lot of art questions.

Also, my main point was that you wouldn't find variable stars in a physics textbook because it is not physics.

Most schools cover some degree of art history--especially given that Art History is an AP course. In contrast, I doubt most schools cover astronomy outside of a surface examination of Earth Science. Certainly, I don't think variable stars is a topic which meets the 90% conversion target that tossups are supposed to have.

Science Olympiad is pretty popular and that'll teach you about variable stars.

That's how I learned about it, but I'm sure not every school out there has Science Olympiad.

[kayli]

No school in the county here does Science Olympiad from what I understand. Also, don't you guys have to choose like the astronomy topic to learn about it? Aren't there like 30 topics to choose from too?

[Unicolored Jay]

No school in the county here does Science Olympiad from what I understand. Also, don't you guys have to choose like the astronomy topic to learn about it? Aren't there like 30 topics to choose from too?

There are a lot of events, not all of which require academic knowledge. And while you don't have to choose Astronomy as a topic (I did) to learn about variable stars, pretty much the only people who know about such things do the event anyways.