The Quizbowl Resource Center

Does anybody's club earn academic credit for quiz bowl? Or know a school where this happens?

The Forensics team here has a class so that the people on the Forensics team can earn academic credit for it. Honors colleges have something similar--they earn credit for what is essentially a series of field trips.

I figure that once we start regularly writing packets, we'll be putting in enough work that it would seem that we should be able to qualify for it.

With the Forensics team, they're sponsored by the Communications department, and get credit through them. One of our problems is that we are so multidisciplinary, we don't really fall into any department or college. Or maybe that can be an advantage, since we could be associated with any of them.

(The other issue is that we can't use student funds/club funds for anything that earns a grade. We'd probably have to differentiate between the stuff we do for class and the stuff that we submit for tournaments where we play.)

Anybody have any experience or ideas about this?

I long to see the day where Quizbowl Theory 301 is available on course catalogs all across America.

Frauny Von Smiley wrote:I long to see the day where Quizbowl Theory 301 is available on course catalogs all across America.

The day quizbowl theory becomes an actual class is the day that I become a tenured professor of Quizbowl Studies.

grapesmoker wrote:

Frauny Von Smiley wrote:I long to see the day where Quizbowl Theory 301 is available on course catalogs all across America.

The day quizbowl theory becomes an actual class is the day that I become a tenured professor of Quizbowl Studies.

I want to guest lecture.

Hmm...I'm not sure how I feel about this, in all honesty.

The forensics and honors groups get credit because what they do (I assume honors is visiting plays or museums) aligns with actual things one studies in college. There is much debate in quizbowl about how much, if at all, quizbowl should emulate what one does in their collegiate study. It should reward academic interest, yes, but quizbowl is mainly about remembering facts and being able to write questions that properly test others' recall of facts. I'm not exactly sure what discipline lines up with this.

One area of potential credit, in my opinion, involves the education department and pedagogy, in particular if you are writing questions for the high school level.

If you are running tournaments or question writing enterprises, you may also consider trying to label it a form of economic enterprise and get some business credit.

Come on, there a bullshit starcraft "game theory" class being offered in Berkeley; this is way more actually educationally viable than that.

Ice Warrior wrote:Come on, there a bullshit starcraft "game theory" class being offered in Berkeley; this is way more actually educationally viable than that.

That's a deCal. Anyone can teach one of those.

Ice Warrior wrote:Come on, there a bullshit starcraft "game theory" class being offered in Berkeley; this is way more actually educationally viable than that.

Having watched some of the lectures, I'm hesitant to demean that class too much.

The purpose of quizbowl is not to test you about what you learn in school; adopting this view is the road to computational math. Thus, if I ran the university, I wouldn't give credit.

But if you can trick your school into giving you credit for quizbowl, why not? I'd rather the school give the team money rather than credit, but it might be a neat little racket to run and could be a recruiting tool.

I seriously don't find anything wrong with giving players an extra credit or so. They already have tons of 'fluff' classes for lack of a better word that offer the same thing and are much less academically valid.

We had a class called "Advanced Reading II" that at one point was a cover for the academic team getting credits. It was an "independent studies" type of class, with a chance for a GPA boost.

It's high school, but I think Central used to have an elective that was basically quizbowl practice, though I could be confusing this with academic decathlon or something.

KGeee wrote:We had a class called "Advanced Reading II" that at one point was a cover for the academic team getting credits. It was an "independent studies" type of class, with a chance for a GPA boost.

Any idea how this worked? Who was the instructor (or, at least, assigned grades)? (Was it somebody associated with quiz bowl?) What college or school or department was it listed under? (Or was this in high school?) (Was it a graded class, or just for credit? I assume that since you said "GPA boost" it was graded.)

As an aside, one of the rumors we always heard during my high school quizbowl days is that teams from "the South" who were good had special classes where they studied quizbowl. This statement was generally lodged in a defamatory matter to explain the inherent unfairness in the victory of these teams.

Bentley Like Beckham wrote:As an aside, one of the rumors we always heard during my high school quizbowl days is that teams from "the South" who were good had special classes where they studied quizbowl. This statement was generally lodged in a defamatory matter to explain the inherent unfairness in the victory of these teams.

I can see that. My idea of looking for academic credit isn't so much to give us a leg up (although we could probably use it), but to give students who are putting in academic work reading and writing some sort of academic reward for it. (And maybe to encourage them to do more writing--something else we certainly can use. I wrote about 2/3 of the packet that we just submitted.)

At some point, when we're experienced enough, we may be able to write questions in between rounds of a tournament we're playing, but right now, it's taking me an hour or more to get a (hopefully) good question together, and I'm probably better at it than my other teammates.

Bentley Like Beckham wrote:As an aside, one of the rumors we always heard during my high school quizbowl days is that teams from "the South" who were good had special classes where they studied quizbowl. This statement was generally lodged in a defamatory matter to explain the inherent unfairness in the victory of these teams.

I think I remember hearing talk about a class just for quizbowl players at Dorman that existed five years or so before I started playing, but I doubt this practice was too widespread...

When I was in high school, it was widespread knowledge* that Ezell-Harding had a class devoted to quizbowl.

*Veracity of knowledge not guaranteed.

tiwonge wrote:

KGeee wrote:We had a class called "Advanced Reading II" that at one point was a cover for the academic team getting credits. It was an "independent studies" type of class, with a chance for a GPA boost.

Any idea how this worked? Who was the instructor (or, at least, assigned grades)? (Was it somebody associated with quiz bowl?) What college or school or department was it listed under? (Or was this in high school?) (Was it a graded class, or just for credit? I assume that since you said "GPA boost" it was graded.)

Forgive the Abe Simpsonesque reply below:

For HCASC, schools are required to have a "coach" to make sure we didn't burn down motels, didn't cause riots, to prepare paperwork, and to help out the team by reading questions and what-not. That person was designated the "instructor" of the course at that time, and I'm guessing (though I don't know) that's how she got paid a little extra for the extra work, when students actually took the course. It was under the Honors College, if I remember correctly for a regular freshman level college credit. I didn't take it due to the fact that the Honors College limited the amount of hours paid for by scholarship to 16 (18 if you were National Merit), and by the time I got around to taking B.S. classes, that class wasn't being offered anymore. It was a good class to take if your gpa was close to falling below the 3.5 range, because if you fell below that-the full scholarship was revoked. If more students had actually continued to take the class, I'm pretty sure they would have still offered, but the person running it was also the head of the Nursing Program and eventually became too busy-and it disappeared. Then we (the quiz bowl team) became more independent and were given a place to practice on our own...and. Oh yes-the point...But yes, in summary "Advanced Reading II" was more or less credit and incentive to get involved with the hcasc/quiz bowl team in the form of credits/gpa boost, which fit the requirement of independent studies classes (which are pretty much all classes that don't meet the requirement of 11 students per classroom)of meeting with the "instructor" for the prescribed hours, helped to secure us a place to practice at, and I think+ helped to compensate for the time of the professor who had to stay late with us.

+my thinking is unverified.

I talked with the coach of the Forensics team here at the beginning of the semester. They've got a for-credit class, but he doesn't get paid any extra for doing that. I suppose it's just a part of his extra-curricular duties. (I know in the math department here, every full-time professor has to have some sort of extra-curricular obligation. Mostly, they serve on various committees or evaluate textbooks or something.)

I can't remeber if it was for one semester or one year, but the University of Maryland had a one credit course which consisted of practice during the CBI days. It was through the Agricultural Extension Department because one of our players, Robert Whaples, had his father in the Agricultural Extension Department. Whaples now teaches economic history at Wake Forest and I think he's still in involved with the quizbowl team. I don't know if he's managed to swing credit.