Editors
Editor-in-Chief: Gautam Kandlikar (UMN)
Assistant Editors: Evan Adams (VCU,) Auroni Gupta (UCSD,) Will Nediger (UWO,) Mehdi Razvi (U Penn,) and George Stevens (Clemson.)
Hosting
We are currently seeking ACF Fall hosts. Hosting is an excellent way to raise money for your club, and allow new quizbowlers in your club to gain exposure to well-written, accessible questions. If you are interested in hosting, please read through the official ACF Hosting Guide and then email me at gautam.acf@gmail.com.
UPDATE: Hosts and contact information:
- Northwest - Boise State University. Contact: Colin McNamara (boiseqb at gmail dot com)
- West - Caltech Univeristy. Contact: Micah Manary (manary at caltech dot edu)
- South Plains - University of Texas at Austin. Contact: Eric Kwartler (ekwartler at gmail dot com)
- Midwest - University of Chicago. Contact: Matt Menard (mmenard AT uchicago DOT edu)
- North - University of Minnesota. Contact: Gautam Kandlikar (kand0028 at umn dot edu)
- Lower Midwest (Missouri) - University of Missouri. Contact: Charlie Dees (mizzouquizbowl at gmail dot com)
- New England - MIT. Contact: Grace Li (graceli at mit dot edu)
- Mid-Atlantic - VCU. Contact: Matt Weiner (mattweiner.vcu at gmail dot com)
- Florida - University of Florida. Contact: Justin Byrd (hthker88 at ufl dot edu)
- Southeast - Georgia Tech. Contact: Adam Leim (liema05 at gmail dot com)
We are still seeking hosts in Eastern Canada and Mid-South region.
UPDATE: Bid Submission Deadlines:
Since I completely forgot about announcing this, I will make the deadlines for submitting bids somewhat later than they were last year. If you want to host ACF Fall and you'd be able to work with your scheduling department to secure rooms even before school starts, please submit your bids by August 31, 2009. This is a "preferred deadline" of sorts. If you need to discuss things with your team and administration in person, please do so and submit your bids by September 15, 2009. I will not accept any more bids after September 15.
On September 1, I'll go through the preferred bids and announce hosts for whichever regions have strong bids. All other hosts will be announced between September 1 and September 16 on a rolling basis.
Packet Submission
As per the ACF submission rules, any team with at least one person on it who played a regular, collegiate, academic quizbowl tournament prior to September 1, 2008 is required to submit a packet in order to participate in an ACF tournament in 2009-2010. This includes ACF Fall. Teams required to submit packets who do not submit one by the final deadline will be dropped from the tournament.
Please submit packets to gautam.acf@gmail.com and use "ACF Fall 2009: [Team Name]" in the subject line.
Submission schedule and additional discount
UPDATE: Please note that the submission deadline for the -$50 discount has been extended. It would be impractical to give programs only 3-4 days after school starts to write a packet. As such, the new submission deadline for the $50 discount is September 19, 2009.
This year's submission schedule is as follows:
Packet submitted on or before:
Sept 19, 2009: -$50
Sept 26, 2009: -$25 (-$50 for teams not required to submit packets)
Oct 10, 2009: No penalty (-$25 for teams not required to submit packets)
Oct 17, 2009: +$25
Oct 24, 2009: +$50
After Oct. 24, 2009: The editors may grant one or more 24-hour extensions at an additional penalty of $10 per day.
Additional discounts are offered for travel, buzzers, staffers, etc. Please refer to the tournament fees and discounts section of the ACF guidelines for further information.
Packet penalties
Teams will incur penalties for the following offenses:
- Incorrect formatting: Several teams continue to submit incorrectly formatted packets despite the guidelines clearly stated on the ACF Question Formatting Guidelines document. Please take a moment to review the guidelines and format your packet accordingly.
- Plagiarism: Please do not attempt to plagiarize. It is often very easy to catch. Please also refer to this thread excoriating those who attempted to plagiarize at ACF Fall 2008.
- Writing specific types of forbidden questions: Types of questions prohibited at ACF events include spelling questions, binary matching bonuses, 5-10-15 bonuses, etc.
Please see the additional packet penalties section for more info.
Friendly reminders
Please refer to the ACF Packet Submission and Fee Information document for a more detailed explanation of submission and fee-related information.
This may seem obvious, but last year there were certain programs which submitted packets on which more than one team had collaborated. Please do NOT do this; it makes your packets useless for play.
Experienced teams writing packets for ACF Fall 2009 are encouraged to follow the difficulty levels of ACF Fall 2008 and ACF Fall 2007. Many teams submitted rather difficult questions for ACF Fall 2008 (discussion can be found in this thread.) Please use the higher difficulty questions for regular difficulty tournaments such as ACF Winter and Penn Bowl. Furthermore, teams new to packet-submission are encouraged to ask me questions about appropriate difficulty levels. Please think twice before submitting avant garde tossups on works from Senegalese literature or writing bonuses on cutting edge research in cancer biology.
High school teams continue to be exempt from packet submission. However, if you would like to submit one, you are certainly encouraged do that. High school teams will be eligible for the same packet submissions discounts as the teams not required to write packets.
If you have any other questions, please let me know at gautam.acf@gmail.com
EDIT: Included links wherever necessary.
