Vancouver Estival Trivia Open question packets

Old college threads.
Susan
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Post by Susan »

styxman wrote:There is no usually to this. Come up with one specific instance where someone who knows everything is beaten by someone who knows less that isn't a: rigged, b: a buzzer race (that shouldn't happen because the smarter player would get it before the buzzer race clue appears), or c: a non-pyramidal question, which inherently creates the situation in part b.
It seems silly to me to state this so dogmatically, and moreover I don't think it's true. It only works if you assume that someone with limited knowledge of a topic will only know the easiest clues about it, which, while it's often the case, certainly isn't universally so.
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Captain Sinico
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Post by Captain Sinico »

vetovian wrote:...When writing a tossup, I think one should try to write it so that whoever knows more about the topic is likely to get it earlier, but what aspect of "more"? I don't think one should always try to work out whether some particular clue that one likes is more likely to be known by people who know a lot about the subject rather than people who pick up random trivia, and then try to reward the first kind of players instead of the second....
Okay, well, that's where your disconnect is. There's enough variance and room for skill in the game that if you don't write or edit at very least damn near every question to reward knowledge, then the benefit of knowledge becomes, at times, questionable (c.f. bad NAQT) or even negative (c.f. CBI or most list questions, for the reason cited above.)
In other words, if you aren't operating on the principle that you ought to make every question reward knowledge first by ordering every clue in that way (to the best of your ability, which is, again, fallible) you are on a slippery slope that will inevitably lead to at least some of your questions being bad, by the definition that they reward things other than knowledge first, more highly, or even alone. Now, you agree at first principle that rewarding knowledge is what a good question does and a question that does anything else isn't as good as it could be. It necessarily follows that, if you want to have the best questions you can, then yes, you must do your best make every question that way.
Now, within that, there's every opportunity to use fun, interesting, or even "cute" clues if you want; you should just write in a way such that those things are not prioritized. If a clue is of the appropriate difficulty, relevant, and interesting, it's a great clue; if a clue is intersting but academically irrelevant to the thing in itself (c.f. that Steinbeck clue,) then it's a poor clue, especially for early in the question. That is to say, the cuteness or interestingness of a clue can never be sufficient to make it a good clue. So, for example, if you find that Steinbeck anecdote funny or interesting, put it at the end so that the people who are good at not thinking too hard and just buzzing with the most famous book about grapes that they can think of can have their fun and then put a bunch of clues based in actual knowledge of the work before it so that someone who actually knows all about The Grapes of Wrath doesn't get beat by someone who knows literally nothing other than "LOL GUYS; GRAPES TURN INTO RASINS!"

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termagant
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Post by termagant »

I’m coming a little late to the party here, but I wanted to add a couple of comments to the discussion. First of all – in the spirit of Peter’s original post, here’s another VETO packet to tear apart:

http://quizbowl.stanford.edu/archive/ve ... a-TEXT.pdf

Just to pre-empt a couple of (deserved) criticisms, I'll say that the questions which may seem bizarrely non-notable to American players are probably the ones I wrote to fulfil VETO’s Canadian content requirement, and that most of them (except Gaetan Soucy, apparently) actually are notable to Canadians and were answered by the field at the tournament.

And let me digress for a moment to say that, yup, filles du roi, Jean Talon, Caledonia and especially Kokanee are pretty frickin’ notable. Kokanee is a really common shitty domestic beer, about as ubiquitous as Budweiser in the States. So notable that to suggest people won’t have heard of it/seen its ads is kind of hilarious. I’ve also never heard of an athlete tearing his ACL, and I disagree with the suggestion that the most obvious clue possible should always be used as the giveaway; I think some ground-level knowledge requirement should be maintained, and in fact I’m kind of surprised to hear people here suggesting otherwise. Oh, and as for this:
I would assert that most of those who played at VETO have no opinions at all about question quality; they are just as happy playing on crappy questions as they are playing on good ones because they don't know the difference.
Anyone who’s been at a tournament with me has probably heard me complain, loudly, about what I in my infinite wisdom deem to be crappy questions. (I also like to complain about incompetent moderation and have been informed that I’ve made at least one moderator cry, but then, I'm kind of a bitch.) I've definitely complained about the questions at both editions of VETO I've attended. I don’t know the Ontario field well enough to know whether there are a lot of people like me who tend to yell about bad questions at their tournaments, but I do know that I’m by no means the only person who does it at UBC. So I’d say “most of those who played at VETOâ€
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