Behavior at tournaments & productive feedback

[Matt Weiner]

OK, here is the long-awaited post about these topics. This is intended to be a discussion, not a manifesto, so feel free to disagree or otherwise contribute, and expect me to think of random additions later on and add them in to this or subsequent posts.

First off, I think there has been a noticeable decline in the quality of people's personal conduct at good quizbowl tournaments over the last one to two years. I expect trash tournaments, and events that attract teams that don't really like quizbowl for their once-a-year forays to DII Sectionals or whatever, to be pretty dismal in terms of the participants' hygiene and propensity to talk at a loud volume about porn, and I've made my peace with that when I attend such events as a player or staffer. However, things used to be a lot better on the mainstream circuit, but we're seeing what I believe are some newly exacerbated problems that I'd like people to think about:

*People making huge displays about question or tournament quality during games in order to draw attention to themselves. Whether ACF Regionals has been replaced with College Bowl IM questions from 1978 and it's the worst thing ever, or someone wrote an otherwise decent question in your favorite subcategory that doesn't meet your esoteric, inarticulable standard for what is an allowable topic in that category, the proper thing to do is to discuss it later, either after the tournament with the editor or on the Internet. Do not under any circumstances hold up a game to show just how much you disapprove of what is happening around you. From a scale of least to most ridiculous, but all still ridiculous, here are things I have seen people do on multiple occasions lately: tell the TD/question writer in detail what they thought of questions in between a tossup and bonus, tell their teammate or opponents, scream at a volunteer moderator who had nothing to do with composing the question set about how stupid a question was. At a minimum, people who do this forfeit their right to complain about games or tournaments taking too long, and when you are literally screaming at anyone, especially people who are not the ones responsible for the inclusion of the question, you're crossing social lines as well.

I'm not challenging anyone's right to the occasional involuntary outburst over losing a buzzer race on a bad clue or whatever. I've previously spoken up in defense of people who like to yell loud expletives when they neg and such. That's part of living in a real world that is not G-rated, and people should deal with it as long as it's directed at the sky and not actually abusive towards the other people in the room. But I've seen things that take minutes on end out of each game and are needlessly hostile towards third parties lately, and they should stop.

*People talking about how they know everything about the topic that someone else just outbuzzed them on. Stop doing this right now. Let your teammate or opponent have his buzz and stop trying to undermine everyone else's knowledge/skill just to defend your own belief that you actually would score 200 PPG if only every question you miss was not written so poorly. This is extremely offensive to newer players and not that great when directed at veterans, either. In the future, I'm going to start asking people who do this why they didn't buzz in if they knew the topic so thoroughly, and it will be you, not me, who is being rude by doing it in the first place. The related phenomenon of explaining that the reason you know who William Penn is was because of a very interesting sugar packet you read during a break in the Fuckville A&M high school tournament you played fifteen years ago and does anyone remember that guy Ronnie who used to play for that team... after every correct buzz you make is not any more endearing and should also cease.

*Talking during the other team's bonus, laughing at how easy your opponent's bonus is, yelling during the completion of the reading of a tossup you negged about how easy the giveaway is: please jump down a well the next time you think about doing these things. I think we need to start penalizing people with additional negs for these behaviors if they don't stop after a few warnings.

*Not a single player showing up by the announced time for a tournament to start, and the whole field not materializing until an hour later, and people then complaining about the event running late: I hope I don't have to explain why this is really dumb, or why I'm astounded that it's happened over and over again this year.

Part two of this post is on the related topic of productive post-tournament discussion. I'll again start with the introspection here. In the past, I've severely lambasted certain people and groups in quizbowl for their bad tournaments, been criticized for it, and defended it. I will still defend those approaches towards people who aren't participating in the rational discussion of how to improve, because I believe those are the approaches that work on those people. However, an integral part of the justification I've given is that there is a distinction between types of editors, a distinction that must be respected. When you are looking at a tournament by someone who is inside the good quizbowl community and can be expected to change his behavior when presented with a reasonable argument for doing so, there are some do's and don'ts to follow.

A big fallacy that I've seen people falling prey to lately is black-and-white criticism of tournaments. Instead of looking at the structural question quality, the answer selection, the moderating quality, the timeliness that the TD brought to the event, the tournament format, the protest resolution, and other elements as separate axes to be evaluated independently, people develop a subjective impression of an entire tournament as either "good" or "bad" and then retroactively justify it by using pretzel logic to characterize every aspect of the tournament as good, or every aspect as bad. This does nothing to help people produce better tournaments in the future, because if what you're really angry at is that a tournament ended at 10 PM, making up problems with the questions that you wouldn't have otherwise noticed in order to avoid admitting that there was anything good in the event is only going to make it more confusing for people trying to figure out what the community wants to see in packets. I think that one way to avoid this pitfall would be for people criticizing/praising an event to clearly mark out which element of the event they are talking about and ask themselves what they really thought of each element, one at a time, to try to find some more balance. Of course, if an event really is awesome in every aspect, or really does suck in every aspect, we should say that, but there are rarely events produced by mainstream quizbowl people that completely suck, and those that are entirely great should be easily identifiable (for example, you shouldn't ever need to say "the fact that the packets were really awesome made it OK to me that it took fourteen hours to play twelve of them" if the tournament really was perfect in every way).

There's also way too much subjective, uncontrolled speculation about, in particular, difficulty of questions, though also about other things (for a recent example, I think it was a huge waste of time for people to go back-and-forth about how many myth questions were actually in Cato-Taco; why not just wait until the packets are released and count instead of having an argument about whose half-remembered feelings are more valid?) More commonly, people say things like "this tossup was too hard because I've never heard of it" or "anyone who's read that book will 30 that bonus" which contribute nothing. Sometimes, these things are meant well but are just the product of people not stepping back and thinking about whether their sample size of 1 is really generalizable to all of quizbowl. At other times, people are looking to justify not doing as well as they thought they should or to brag about knowing something, and we get the same sorts of posts. Whatever the reason, I think it would be great to see more comments like "I talked to some other teams and it seems like no one got that question" than personal anecdotes. This sort of analysis will be greatly helped if and when we get a stats program that can show us performance by a tournament field on an individual question; until such time, let's use more of a "writer's judgment" on what's hard rather than basing everything on how your team performed.

I think there is also some criticism coming in bad faith or for social reasons, which of course is a cancerous influence on reasonable discussion. It's important that people say what they actually believe and not parrot things they've heard elsewhere or come up with implausible statements in order to make their criticism more cutting. I was dismayed when people posted in the thread about Sunday's tournament that they would not have attended had they known there would be some missing science tossups, or that they wished it was 15 rounds long. I actually find it very hard to believe that the people in question would have skipped a quizbowl tournament being held in the city that they were already present in for the previous day's tournament, or that a tournament ending at 10 PM on a Sunday would have been just peachy with them. If an event deviates from the right distribution, or charges you too much for 9 rounds, then say precisely those things and explain why they are true. Don't say other things that aren't true because you want to drive your point home with more forceful threats and proclamations. Similarly, if you don't like someone who runs a tournament because he's not in your social circle, or is associated with someone you had an Internet argument with last week, that doesn't mean his tournament sucked; if you do like someone because he is your friend, it doesn't mean that his late, poorly edited questions were no big deal while someone else's are the end of the world. Applying double standards to your posts is not only fundamentally unfair, it makes people unable to figure out what they are supposed to do. If you are a frequent contributor to post-tournament discussion threads, then your opinion about any given practice should be easily predictable in advance by any competent editor. If it isn't, that means you don't have a reasonable, objective set of principles that you are deriving your opinions about specific events from, and are probably changing your opinion from week to week based on the vagaries of your feelings or friendships. It also means that people have nothing to go on when they are trying to produce an event that will satisfy you.

As a minor aside, I think people need to avoid saying things that don't take into account how tournaments are constructed when criticizing difficulty or quality. What I have in mind here is people saying they didn't like some particular round in an NAQT tournament or thought the science in a round of some event where all the science is written by a central source was too hard. When people are writing a pile of questions at once and then putting them into packets based only on distributional balance, that means that any variance in quality or difficulty from one packet to the next is purely random, and criticizing based on rounds rather than explaining why some individual question was too hard, not written well, etc, doesn't really address a correctable flaw.

Everything you post in a post-tournament discussion thread with a person you consider to be reasonable should be under the rubric of "what do I hope to accomplish by posting this." Perhaps you want to change the editor's behavior so his next tournament is better. Perhaps you want to allow third-party editors reading the thread to learn something about what practices they should be following. If you just want to vent, well, a lot of people would rather you didn't, but perhaps you could consider doing it in a more appropriate way (best: actually explaining what was wrong with a tournament's questions and why; better than the alternatives: ranting about question quality on the Internet after a tournament with poor question quality; worse: ranting about the tournament ending time because you are actually pissed about the question quality and are up in arms that someone found a positive part of the event; worst: ranting during games about the questions). We're all trying to get more people involved and produce events that are worth spending time and money on here, so let's try to direct our comments towards achieving that end rather than satisfying other, often conflicting, goals.

[No Rules Westbrook]

I can't believe that I got to the end of a 13-paragraph Matt Weiner post without disagreeing about anything.

I would point out that, at most events, you can indeed control the difficulty of questions in each packet - and arrange them purposely so that four easy history tus don't get thrown in a round with four really hard science tus, etc. Like I've said before, I think a lot of problems in these areas would be fixed if people completed/finalized one packet at a time and did purposeful randomization by hand (and proofread as they go along) - instead of having the usual last-minute "throw all this crap into packets at 4 AM" affair that inevitably leads to all kinds of stuff going wrong.

[Mechanical Beasts]

I was dismayed when people posted in the thread about Sunday's tournament that they would not have attended had they known there would be some missing science tossups, or that they wished it was 15 rounds long. I actually find it very hard to believe that the people in question would have skipped a quizbowl tournament being held in the city that they were already present in for the previous day's tournament, or that a tournament ending at 10 PM on a Sunday would have been just peachy with them. If an event deviates from the right distribution, or charges you too much for 9 rounds, then say precisely those things and explain why they are true.

I do agree with the tremendous majority of what you have to say, Matt, and I'm glad that it's getting said. To the (hopefully not too terrible) extent that it applies to my behavior, I'm aware of it and am working on it. What I will say is that whether you believe it or not, I meant precisely what I said about how I would not have played this tournament if I knew what I would have received for my money ("some missing science tossups" being a bland description of what went on there); I had plenty of other things I could have done instead. This probably doesn't apply to the majority of attendees, of course, but I saw it as a productive framing of the issues since it related that some of the issues were severe enough as to be a deal-breaker for someone in my position. I'm content to, in the future, merely say the above, particularly because in the future I don't expect what I said will be true too frequently (I hope).

[grapesmoker]

Speaking of productive feedback...

I find a worrying trend recently of people seizing on minor differences in formulation or aesthetic principles of tossup construction (things that don't actually affect question quality as such) and doggedly pursuing an agenda of conformity to whatever their ideal happens to be. This has gone on both on IRC and on the boards much more than used to be the case of late, and I think people really need to step back and reassess the quality and usefulness of such criticisms. There's this weird culture of hypercriticism developing where anyone whose opinions differ from someone else's arbitrarily declared aesthetic quizbowl ideal is pounced on, and these debates are more and more resembling some kind of circular firing squad.

I would suggest that people reevaluate what they're doing when they are offering criticisms of questions. If a question has a specific thing wrong with it (misplaced clue, obviously succeptible to lateral thinking, lack of proper gradation of bonus parts or clues, grammatical problems, etc.) then point out that thing. But if someone worded a sentence in one way where you would have worded it another way, or selected an answer that isn't actually egregious but which displeases you in some ill-defined way even though the actual play of the question had no problems with it, leave it alone. There are going to be differences between the way different people write questions and the way that they select their answers, and I think that's mostly a good thing. My suggestion is that people redirect their energy to actually improving question construction rather than continue to bicker over essentially immaterial distinctions.

[Jesus vs. Dragons]

OK, here is the long-awaited post about these topics. This is intended to be a discussion, not a manifesto, so feel free to disagree or otherwise contribute, and expect me to think of random additions later on and add them in to this or subsequent posts.

First off, I think there has been a noticeable decline in the quality of people's personal conduct at good quizbowl tournaments over the last one to two years. I expect trash tournaments, and events that attract teams that don't really like quizbowl for their once-a-year forays to DII Sectionals or whatever, to be pretty dismal in terms of the participants' hygiene and propensity to talk at a loud volume about porn, and I've made my peace with that when I attend such events as a player or staffer. However, things used to be a lot better on the mainstream circuit, but we're seeing what I believe are some newly exacerbated problems that I'd like people to think about:

*People making huge displays about question or tournament quality during games in order to draw attention to themselves. Whether ACF Regionals has been replaced with College Bowl IM questions from 1978 and it's the worst thing ever, or someone wrote an otherwise decent question in your favorite subcategory that doesn't meet your esoteric, inarticulable standard for what is an allowable topic in that category, the proper thing to do is to discuss it later, either after the tournament with the editor or on the Internet. Do not under any circumstances hold up a game to show just how much you disapprove of what is happening around you. From a scale of least to most ridiculous, but all still ridiculous, here are things I have seen people do on multiple occasions lately: tell the TD/question writer in detail what they thought of questions in between a tossup and bonus, tell their teammate or opponents, scream at a volunteer moderator who had nothing to do with composing the question set about how stupid a question was. At a minimum, people who do this forfeit their right to complain about games or tournaments taking too long, and when you are literally screaming at anyone, especially people who are not the ones responsible for the inclusion of the question, you're crossing social lines as well.

I'm not challenging anyone's right to the occasional involuntary outburst over losing a buzzer race on a bad clue or whatever. I've previously spoken up in defense of people who like to yell loud expletives when they neg and such. That's part of living in a real world that is not G-rated, and people should deal with it as long as it's directed at the sky and not actually abusive towards the other people in the room. But I've seen things that take minutes on end out of each game and are needlessly hostile towards third parties lately, and they should stop.

*People talking about how they know everything about the topic that someone else just outbuzzed them on. Stop doing this right now. Let your teammate or opponent have his buzz and stop trying to undermine everyone else's knowledge/skill just to defend your own belief that you actually would score 200 PPG if only every question you miss was not written so poorly. This is extremely offensive to newer players and not that great when directed at veterans, either. In the future, I'm going to start asking people who do this why they didn't buzz in if they knew the topic so thoroughly, and it will be you, not me, who is being rude by doing it in the first place. The related phenomenon of explaining that the reason you know who William Penn is was because of a very interesting sugar packet you read during a break in the Fuckville A&M high school tournament you played fifteen years ago and does anyone remember that guy Ronnie who used to play for that team... after every correct buzz you make is not any more endearing and should also cease.

*Talking during the other team's bonus, laughing at how easy your opponent's bonus is, yelling during the completion of the reading of a tossup you negged about how easy the giveaway is: please jump down a well the next time you think about doing these things. I think we need to start penalizing people with additional negs for these behaviors if they don't stop after a few warnings.

*Not a single player showing up by the announced time for a tournament to start, and the whole field not materializing until an hour later, and people then complaining about the event running late: I hope I don't have to explain why this is really dumb, or why I'm astounded that it's happened over and over again this year.

Entering only my third year of competitive quizbowl, I have noticed an exorbitant amount of all of these (minus the last one). I completely agree with all of your observations here, and I would be lying if I said that I have not done a couple of those multiple times. On the community college level, we play people who have never experienced quizbowl, so the outburst/talking/bitching and moaning is a common occurrence with a large portion of our field. I wish that we could post these rules at every tournament and I do wish that a punishment for the third part would be written into the rulebooks.

[Ethnic history of the Vilnius region]

I wanted to resurrect this thread because it brushes on something that I think could be an issue at more and more tournaments.

I've previously spoken up in defense of people who like to yell loud expletives when they neg and such. That's part of living in a real world that is not G-rated, and people should deal with it as long as it's directed at the sky and not actually abusive towards the other people in the room.

I’ve done this before myself, but I generally try to avoid it. I personally wish some folks would exercise a little more restraint here. An occasional outburst might be unavoidable, but I don’t see why people can’t control themselves enough to avoid loudly yelling the f-bomb every time they lose a buzzer race. But whatever. As Matt says, we don’t live in a G-rated world, and I’m not going to cry and run out of a room because someone said “Damn.” Though that would be kinda funny.

Anyway, the main point of this post is to address an area in which I think these kinds of outbursts would be problematic. Most in the quizbowl community, including myself, seem to think high school players at college events is a good thing. But if high schoolers are going to be attending college events, college players probably need to understand that high schoolers are not mini college students. They have a different status. Thus, I think it’s basically unacceptable to yell expletives in front of high school players.

I understand that most high schoolers attending quizbowl tournaments are world-wise and have been exposed lots of things, and I know that most high schoolers won’t take any offense to a four letter word. My concern has more to do with the adults charged with the care of the high schoolers. If coaches see college players frequently cussing in front of their players, they might not appreciate it. If parents or chaperons see it, they might not appreciate it. If coaches, parents, administrators, or principals aren’t even at the tournament but get wind of college players cursing in front of their students, they might not appreciate it. This can lead to bad things, such as high school programs prohibiting their students from attending college events.

This probably brings up other potential issues for another thread, such as the appropriateness of reading questions with explicit content in front of high school players (which I saw in an awkward moment at one tournament this past year). I’ll allow that 99% of the time, such scenarios discussed above probably won’t matter. But if the college quizbowl community is serious about hosting high schoolers at college tournaments, these are things to consider.

[grapesmoker]

Uh, when I'm running a high school event, I behave myself in the manner appropriate to that event. When I'm playing a college tournament, what some schoolmarm is going to think of me for subjecting her precious offspring to a choice word or three is really not my concern. If you come to a college tournament, I assume you're a big kid who can handle it; you probably hear worse things in gym class anyway.

[at your pleasure]

Is it even that common for parents or to accompany high-school aged offspring at college tournaments? I've only been to a few college tournaments,but my impression is that it's not the most common thing in the world.

[Ethnic history of the Vilnius region]

Is it even that common for parents or to accompany high-school aged offspring at college tournaments? I've only been to a few college tournaments,but my impression is that it's not the most common thing in the world.

I saw this at a few events this past year, though I think it's generally more common to have individual high schoolers attend events alone as opposed to attending with their entire teams and coaches.

[dtaylor4]

I agree with Jerry. College events are written for a collegiate audience. If you come to a college tournament, don't expect it to be like a high school tournament.

[Ethnic history of the Vilnius region]

Yeah, your points are well taken.

[JackGlerum]

Is it even that common for parents or to accompany high-school aged offspring at college tournaments? I've only been to a few college tournaments,but my impression is that it's not the most common thing in the world.

For what it's worth, last year, my dad drove my team to ACF Winter (and watched) and Mr. Riley took us to (and watched) TIT.

Neither of them would have cared if someone dropped an f-bomb--and I concur that high school competitors at college events should be prepared for expletives--but I just wanted to point out that in my experience, supervisors/family are sometimes present at these things.

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

I'm pretty sure I swore when I negged even in HS and nobody cared. And this was in a strict league where you had to wear matching uniforms.

[Down and out in Quintana Roo]

Why are we talking about this when there are so many other important issues that Matt brought up? Tardiness and accountability thereof, for instance.

[Cheynem]

Tardiness is always going to be the elephant in the room when it comes to quizbowl.

Let's take VCU Open Weekend. At both tournaments, very few participants were actually there at the set time the tournament was to start. This is a dilemma. Assuming that everything is ready to go at the set time (which to be frank, is not always the case), what do you do? Do you really want to hand out forfeits to a good chunk of your first round games? That's not cool. If we contact them and know that they're on their way, how much leeway time do we give them? And this snowballs. Suddenly, if you're an usual diligent tournament-on-time attendee, you get frustrated that every tournament you go to never starts on time and you start to drag your heels a bit in the morning, knowing that if you get there at 8:30, you're just going to sit around for a hour anyway.

I'm not really sure what the solution is. One might be to set slightly later start times, acknowledge that the tournament will get over later, and then strenuously set rules about arrival times. One obvious solution would be for TD's to make sure the tournament is at least ready to start on time. Being late has more of an impact (even if you don't forfeit anything) if you know that everyone is just waiting on you instead of your arrival late having no effect whatsoever because you'll still have to wait ten more minutes.

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

MIT once ran a tournament where they charged a very high entry fee, with a large discount if you showed up on time. This eliminates the problem of "do I make Brown A forfeit a game to Amherst C if they show up late" while still deterring it. And it even lets people "buy time" if they really don't want to get up until 9. In theory you could compensate other teams forced to wait by redistributing the de facto late fee to them.

I find this ingenious.

[at your pleasure]

In theory you could compensate other teams forced to wait by redistributing the de facto late fee to them.

In theory, however, couldn't a team or teams that valued the cash more that everyone else's convience connive to delay teams so they can get a cut of the late fee? Or is that just ridiculously cynical?

[Mechanical Beasts]

In theory you could compensate other teams forced to wait by redistributing the de facto late fee to them.

In theory, however, couldn't a team or teams that valued the cash more that everyone else's convience connive to delay teams so they can get a cut of the late fee? Or is that just ridiculously cynical?

If you blow out an opponent's tire for profit you've also already kidnapped the TD, intercepted the email with the question set, and tortured some Falun Gong in your spare time.

[Sima Guang Hater]

tortured some Falun Gong in your spare time.

where else are we supposed to get organs from

[grapesmoker]

MIT once ran a tournament where they charged a very high entry fee, with a large discount if you showed up on time. This eliminates the problem of "do I make Brown A forfeit a game to Amherst C if they show up late" while still deterring it. And it even lets people "buy time" if they really don't want to get up until 9. In theory you could compensate other teams forced to wait by redistributing the de facto late fee to them.

I find this ingenious.

Ah, the cap-and-trade system of tournament attendance.

Seriously folks, show up on time. 15 minutes late is probably not a big deal, but I've routinely seen people show up over an hour late to events (and to my everlasting shame, I have sometimes been one of those people). If it's through no fault of your own, that's fine, but if you just can't be bothered to wake up on time and figure out where you're going, you're gonna forfeit some games.

[Stained Diviner]

I just want to make sure that high school coaches/parents/students reading this thread do not get the wrong impression. I've taken my team to two college tournaments, and both times the hosts and other teams were very welcoming towards us. Teams going to a college tournament may hear an f-bomb or two, but you should not stay away from such tournaments out of fear that your team will end up in negative environments. The overall environment is positive, and the overall experience is very good for high school students.

[Ethnic history of the Vilnius region]

I just want to make sure that high school coaches/parents/students reading this thread do not get the wrong impression. I've taken my team to two college tournaments, and both times the hosts and other teams were very welcoming towards us. Teams going to a college tournament may hear an f-bomb or two, but you should not stay away from such tournaments out of fear that your team will end up in negative environments. The overall environment is positive, and the overall experience is very good for high school students.

Yeah, thanks for pointing this out. I didn't want to give the wrong impression that college tournaments aren't welcoming to high school teams or inappropriate on the whole. Quite the opposite.

[millionwaves]

Why are we talking about this when there are so many other important issues that Matt brought up? Tardiness and accountability thereof, for instance.

Hey, if you think that people aren't discussing the things that you think are important in this thread, the proper thing to do is to start a new thread, not to try to tell people that they're not discussing the right things. Thanks!

[Howard]

In the past, I've severely lambasted certain people and groups in quizbowl for their bad tournaments, been criticized for it, and defended it. I will still defend those approaches towards people who aren't participating in the rational discussion of how to improve, because I believe those are the approaches that work on those people.

This is the only area where I strongly disagree with Matt's position. We've discussed some points of this issue before as they related to other topics, so I'll try to keep my points to things I don't believe have been said before. And of course, Matt, you're welcome to point out if I've misread your implications.

The way I read this, I gather that such lambasting occurs because the tournament is bad as assessed by Matt's standards. I'll cede the point that Matt has an excellent handle on what makes a good tournament using the definition of "quiz bowl" widely accepted by the vast majority of members of this board. The problem is that numerous hosts construct tournaments outside this definition of quiz bowl, and they do this on purpose. Irate or rude criticism of such hosts and/or tournaments implies presumption that those being critical believe they are in a better position to determine what the host wishes to offer than the host themselves.

When I organize a tournament, I do it to meet my own and my team's goals, not those of someone else. If my tournament attendance is low, there's a lesson to be learned, whether it has to do with past performance, question style, or poor advertising. Presuming that I've accurately represented my tournament in advance to those teams that attended, I'm not going to be terribly interested in rude comments by someone who wasn't part of the target audience of the tournament in the first place.

[Charbroil]

Presuming that I've accurately represented my tournament in advance to those teams that attended, I'm not going to be terribly interested in rude comments by someone who wasn't part of the target audience of the tournament in the first place.

While whether the tone of someone's criticism is appropriate is certainly up for debate, isn't it going too far to say that people outside of a tournament's target audience are ineligible to criticize it? Making constructive criticism of anyone else's tourneys impossible would make it impossible for anyone to teach anyone else how to improve their tournaments, since I would imagine that most of the people doing that kind of teaching aren't part of a tournament audience.

Edit: (Another point I forgot to mention) Also, it's worth noting that people go to tournaments for reasons other than good questions and/or formats. Just because lots of teams show up to a tournament doesn't mean that there aren't issues with it--it might just mean that the tournament's close or the teams don't recognize the issues. The fact that those teams keep coming doesn't make advice/criticism from someone with experience like Matt any less legitimate.

[Auroni]

Criticism of tournaments is something that people outside one's immediate group of quizbowl friends and contacts will always do, because such advice is valuable and rooted in the myriad of tournament experiences that these people have had, positive and negative. This should actually be regarded as a privilege, as this sort of network is rare in other activities and is maintained by a common desire for the quality of all quizbowl events everywhere to be the best they can be. Sometimes, this criticism will take on a harsher tone, and might certainly be "rude" and viscerally displeasing. But to dismiss it and remain dependent on one's limited insular experiences is really harmful, and simply fosters isolation and alienation from the rest of the circuit.

[at your pleasure]

Presuming that I've accurately represented my tournament in advance to those teams that attended, I'm not going to be terribly interested in rude comments by someone who wasn't part of the target audience of the tournament in the first place.

Is this referring to complaints about high school tournaments targeted at non-circuit teams that mostly exist for TV shows? While there are issues with that premise, they are somewhat different than the issues with the argument that people should not criticize tournaments they did not attend.

[Matt Weiner]

Hey, I was kind of interested in talking about the way people conduct themselves at good collegiate tournaments and how to offer helpful feedback afterwards, not offer a platform for people to recycle old canards about how no one should ever have any standards and their tournaments are immune from criticism because they're not intended to be good or whatever.

[theMoMA]

Isn't it shocking how all of these carefully constructed protests against mainstream quizbowl all take the form of unedited packets with wild variations in difficulty, length, and quality? It's almost as if these "rebellious" "editors" simply want to legitimize charging hundreds of dollars for doing nothing. Engaging this kind of discussion is counterproductive because there's no reason to expect these editors to change.

What isn't counterproductive is addressing the audience of these tournaments. Tournaments like ACF Fall, EFT, Minnesota Undergrad, and Penn Bowl are length- and difficulty-controlled and have had great success in providing all levels of teams with fair, fun, good questions. We're getting better at engaging new and possibly skeptical programs, and we're breaking down the stereotypes that circuit quizbowl has been stigmatized with in the past. How we engage the vestiges of quizbowl past isn't really a concern.

[JackGlerum]

Hey, I was kind of interested in talking about the way people conduct themselves at good collegiate tournaments and how to offer helpful feedback afterwards

Re: post tournament feedback

What do people think about criticizing specific questions? I have been guilty of venting about individual stuff that has pissed me off and I have seen threads in the past get derailed by similar posts. It's easy to do since most of us have a specialty and thus are prone to bitch about something we didn't like, but is that productive? I think you can go both ways.

[Cheynem]

I hark back to the movie Finding Forrester here. In that movie, Forrester talks about "soup questions," which are questions that are meant to stimulate learning and productive conversation as opposed to just trying to be snoopy or demonstrating one's own knowledge. This actually helped me in college because there were a few times when I would ask a question in class to demonstrate that I knew something and that never went well. I think examining specific questions in quizbowl is fine if you're making a soup question, like if you genuinely want to know something for improving as a writer ("Were those good middle clues? A good giveaway?") or for communicating with other writers ("What did you think about using that lit crit opening?") or even for a little good old fashioned didactic reasoning ("That's a terrible lead-in because you're really just referencing the movie version.")

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

Hey, I was kind of interested in talking about the way people conduct themselves at good collegiate tournaments and how to offer helpful feedback afterwards

Re: post tournament feedback

What do people think about criticizing specific questions? I have been guilty of venting about individual stuff that has pissed me off and I have seen threads in the past get derailed by similar posts. It's easy to do since most of us have a specialty and thus are prone to bitch about something we didn't like, but is that productive? I think you can go both ways.

This is the downside of the triumph of good quizbowl and the post-2006 boom in good writing. Now that fewer and fewer mainstream events suffer from systemic problems that sink their tentacles into every tossup, we are left to complain about specific things.

[No Rules Westbrook]

Well, it depends. With tournament criticism, I'd like to see people focus on issues that any trained observer can see - lack of pyramidality, lack of well-researched accurate and specific clues at appropriate places in questions, etc. - the type of things that can be helpful to people looking to improve writing. I don't think it's as helpful when people point to just one music tossup and go "this clue about orchestration in tu X really doesn't help me!" - if there's some systemic problem in the writing that future editors or writers can reasonably avoid, then it's helpful.

[negatron]

Once my teacher was reading college questions and read a question about David Mamet. It seemed to have been written by David Mamet. The extra swearing didn't really contribute anything to the question. I mean, a question about Sade which describes his work is one thing, but the mamet question should have been clean.

On a related note I once spent three minutes waiting for my team and the other team to quiet down after I powered absurdly early. Everyone present but me thought I had neged, but they were wrong. Laugh *after* you know its wrong, or you will end up with egg on your face.