2014 BELLOCO General Discussion

[Alejandro Buendia]

Please post any general comments you have about the set in this thread.

[adamsil]

I enjoyed this set--it's the best HS housewrite I've read this year. It was very straightforward--I don't remember very many interesting answerlines, but everything was pretty standard, and the difficulty was at least appropriate. I've been lambasting other housewrites on these forums, honestly, so regardless of how obnoxious this post gets, you guys really did do a great job. :)

A few minor impressions I had.

The science was well done. There were a few questions that I disagree with (the tossup on Maxwell's demon, like all tossups on Maxwell's demon, was a bad idea), but I don't remember anything flat-out wrong, and the questions stayed answerable, with good clues. I rarely praise HS science questions; you guys did a good job. I also thought the mythology and philosophy were terrific for this level.

The worst distribution, in my opinion, was actually the American history. This is usually something that housewrites do well--but I was really underwhelmed by it. A tossup on the Election of 1848? Why? It's not going to get converted AND it's not interesting, AND the round after it (I think) had a tossup on Franklin Pierce? It was a lot of 19th century president bowl, and I remember just not enjoying a category that usually lends itself to interesting questions.

It seemed like there was a lot of world literature, regardless of what the distribution ended up being, and I really don't think you needed that much of it. (I oppose even 0.5/0.5 world lit, personally). I thought the literature was pretty standard, all in all; nothing too exciting, but not offensive either.

The geography seemed very difficult, in general, compared to the other subjects, though I don't remember any specifics.

My overall feeling from this tournament was that it felt like the most NAQT-ish tournament I've heard on mACF format. That's not necessarily a bad thing--but I didn't see a lot of gradation on bonuses, for instance. It was a lot of medium part/medium part/medium part, with some bonuses throwing a curveball in difficulty on either end of the spectrum.

All in all, though, it was a very good set with difficulty solidly controlled. Well done.

[RexSueciae]

Was it just me, or was there a massive dearth of sports trash? I'm not complaining because sports are silly but I was kinda surprised.

Some of the bonuses felt like they had two easy parts, especially literature (name the work, name the author, name another work by this author that's of pretty much equal difficulty).

[Bolt52]

Great tournament overall.

The one thing that our team noticed was that (though we may be wrong) there seem to be a lot of world history and literature, especially in the European history. Now our team doesn't go to very many tournaments and we are in no position to say this is wrong, all we know is that those are the subjects we are bad at and that was one of the major reasons of some of poor performances.

The trash and current events were excellent, and as a science school we have to note that for a house write the science questions were excellent.

All in all, an excellent tournament, thank you at Bellum for writing and RM for mirroring. The quality of this tournament was one of the best that out team has ever been to.