bt_green_warbler wrote: Did we succeed?
Maybe I'm wrong because I played on a team with some good people, but I thought that DII Set was not challenging at all.
If only there were some kind of more challenging version of the SCT that you could play as a parallel tournament with other people who found the DII set entirely too easy. . . Oh well, I guess we can dream, right?
bt_green_warbler wrote:One of NAQT's goals for this year's SCT was to lower the difficulty of the tournament (in both divisions). Did we succeed? Discuss.
Mike Bentley wrote:bt_green_warbler wrote:One of NAQT's goals for this year's SCT was to lower the difficulty of the tournament (in both divisions). Did we succeed? Discuss.
As a writer, I never received a message that this was a goal of this year's SCT. Did I just miss this, or was it never sent out?
What is it like to be a Batman? wrote:If only there were some kind of more challenging version of the SCT that you could play as a parallel tournament with other people who found the DII set entirely too easy. . . Oh well, I guess we can dream, right?
Sarcasm aside, that wasn't an option for me, since Section 4 played a combined field on DII questions. Obviously you shouldn't write primarily for the DI players who are forced to play down, that's not your primary audience, but maybe they're worth keeping in mind?
Plan Rubber wrote:Maybe I'm wrong because I played on a team with some good people, but I thought that DII Set was not challenging at all. I'm not trying to say that it should be hard to the point where it alienates new schools or anything like that, it's right that it's easy, but there were some tossups (for example, mentioning Edward Everett at the beginning of Gettysburg) where I could think of maybe one or two things that could possibly be better known than a power clue that weren't the giveaway. I can't think of too many examples now, but when I was playing I'd say at least a third of the powers people on my team got made me wonder why that was a power, rather than be impressed at their deep knowledge. Similarly, a decent number of bonuses left me wondering if there was supposed to be any hard part. I'll try to enumerate this better in the specific question thread where there are more answerlines, but I felt like sometimes the DII set was closer to a high school set than a college set that appealed to new teams.
marnold wrote:bt_green_warbler wrote: Did we succeed?
Yep
DumbJaques wrote:What is it like to be a Batman? wrote:Quotes not here to prevent over-nesting
Incidentally, no, they're not really worth keeping in mind. A DI field having to play DII questions is a bad situation nobody wants and everyone works hard to avoid, and really it happens very rarely in competitive regions where it would actually be a big problem. DII serves a very significant purpose in college quizbowl, and it should be entirely crafted with that purpose in mind, not with an eye toward the potential collateral damage it might maybe someday cause to some Alabama grad student's stock clue monocle (I was under the impression James Johnson murdered any grad students who tried to join the Alabama team anyway). You should write DI questions for DI teams, and DII questions for DII teams. If that's not what ends up happening, the solution is not to write harder DII questions just in case; it's to figure out how to get more than three DI teams to show up at a multi-state national qualifier for the largest college tournament of the year.
Superb_starling wrote:Cup of Gold
DumbJaques wrote:Sarcasm entirely not aside, uh, that's nice, but this post quoted a comment by an entirely different person who played at another site (where no such issue existed, but that's not really the point). I have absolutely no idea why you seem to have concluded it was directed at you, but the idea that NAQT should write their DII questions with DI players in mind has nothing to do with that stuff anyway. I really have no idea what you're talking about here.
Incidentally, no, they're not really worth keeping in mind. A DI field having to play DII questions is a bad situation nobody wants and everyone works hard to avoid, and really it happens very rarely in competitive regions where it would actually be a big problem. DII serves a very significant purpose in college quizbowl, and it should be entirely crafted with that purpose in mind, not with an eye toward the potential collateral damage it might maybe someday cause to some Alabama grad student's stock clue monocle (I was under the impression James Johnson murdered any grad students who tried to join the Alabama team anyway). You should write DI questions for DI teams, and DII questions for DII teams. If that's not what ends up happening, the solution is not to write harder DII questions just in case; it's to figure out how to get more than three DI teams to show up at a multi-state national qualifier for the largest college tournament of the year.
Superb_starling wrote:I'd like to point out that I probably should be playing DII, which is probably not true of Harrison under perfect circumstances (Those perfect circumstances where your school has a number of DII non-eligible people perfectly divisible by four(Or at least can convince that many people to play DI), and your region doesn't run a combined field). This is my first year playing on pyramidal questions; you'll find more on NAQT's website from searching my younger sister than you'll find from searching me.
bt_green_warbler wrote:One of NAQT's goals for this year's SCT was to lower the difficulty of the tournament (in both divisions). Did we succeed? Discuss.
Mechanical Beasts wrote:Everyone who would characterize himself as a "top highschool player," no matter the region, should know some leadins at a sectional tournament on DII questions. The point of leadins is for some people to be buzzing on them and others not to be; you can't have that if zero people think "my word, I KNOW that" on clue one-point-five.
What is it like to be a Batman? wrote:[ I don't think it's too much to ask that people like me should be served by DII as well as players who only know high school clues.
The Hub (Gainesville, Florida) wrote:Why should D2 cater to players good enough to play D1?
What is it like to be a Batman? wrote:The Hub (Gainesville, Florida) wrote:Why should D2 cater to players good enough to play D1?
Because the DII field isn't some Platonic ideal of fresh-faced kids straight out of high school who've never played pyramidal tossups before. There are going to be people like Matt Jackson last year, like Joseph and Joey from Auburn, like our grad students who played DII because of the combined field, and like me -- people who could and perhaps should play DI but for whatever reason will play DII instead.
I suppose it comes down to whether one should write pragmatically, considering the distribution of people who are actually going to play a tournament, or ideologically, considering who you think should play that tournament. I'm in favor of the former, obviously, but there are probably good arguments to be made for the latter.
Cernel Joson wrote:Look dude, you missed one in three bonus parts and failed to power most tossups when power extended through the majority of the question. Statistically, you were not so good that this tournament failed to challenge you. Maybe some individual questions were too easy, but the numbers confirm that the set as a whole was not.
Cernel Joson wrote:EDIT: So yeah. At your site, 11.8% of tossups were powered, and the average bonus conversion was around 14.7. That's right around NAQT's goal and maybe even a little lower.
What is it like to be a Batman? wrote:Cernel Joson wrote:Look dude, you missed one in three bonus parts and failed to power most tossups when power extended through the majority of the question. Statistically, you were not so good that this tournament failed to challenge you. Maybe some individual questions were too easy, but the numbers confirm that the set as a whole was not.
I think "most tossups" is a pretty arbitrary dividing line. I also agree that we shouldn't base any decisions on one asshole claiming the set was too easy for him, particularly when hindsight bias makes people liable to misremember the difficulty. But the top four teams at my site, between them, powered over 30% of the tossups they heard. At least two, and I think three, of those teams were eligible to play DII. At last year's D1 ICT, the top four teams powered just under 20% of the tossups they heard. Statistically, this was considerably easier for its audience.
The other thing is: I'm not actually that good. Outside of philosophy, math/CS, and social sciences, I'm going to miss probably upward of 50% of regular-difficulty questions, even after the giveaway. I know, because I've read packets and tracked my progress. I should not be getting 4.5 powers a game, especially against pretty good competition, at this level.
What is it like to be a Batman? wrote:But the top four teams at my site, between them, powered over 30% of the tossups they heard. At least two, and I think three, of those teams were eligible to play DII. At last year's D1 ICT, the top four teams powered just under 20% of the tossups they heard. Statistically, this was considerably easier for its audience.
Frater Taciturnus wrote:Will similar adjustments be made for ICT and/or HSNCT, or was this strictly an effort to reduce SCT difficulty?
Cernel Joson wrote:OK, this is a somewhat more reasonable post. I think the issue here is that you're deriving an "ought" from an "is." The fact that you don't normally power that many questions doesn't mean that something is wrong if you get more 15's on an intentionally easier set with generous powermarking. Again, statistically, it seems like the set did its job. You also may just be a better player than you thought you were and shouldn't worry about that stuff. It seems like it's an issue that's not worth looking into--you did very well on an easy set, no more, no less.
What is it like to be a Batman? wrote:Edit: Also, Nick, you're double-counting a lot of questions. The top four teams played each other seven times, so they heard fewer questions than the sum of the TUH provided between them. (It's an easy mistake to make... I'm just a combinatorialist, so I'm accustomed to working with sieves, haha.)
What is it like to be a Batman? wrote:Cernel Joson wrote:EDIT: So yeah. At your site, 11.8% of tossups were powered, and the average bonus conversion was around 14.7. That's right around NAQT's goal and maybe even a little lower.
Nope. You're double-counting total number of TUH. 23.6% of tossups were powered.
Superb_starling wrote:Our DII field had very little margin for error; Games between the top three teams had margins of victory of less than a tossup/bonus in two of them (Alabama B v. Auburn and Auburn v. UCF A), and tossups like those mentioned earlier could have had really bad impacts on those games. That's more of my concern as to what was done with the difficulty, that in making it easier overall, the occasional tossup escaped so far over the line that it did nothing to delineate between two different levels of knowledge and just gave points to whoever won the buzzer race
What is it like to be a Batman? wrote:I'm not saying that the entire DII tournament should be written for DI-quality players. But the difficulty should be spread out, and I think the upper tail of that distribution wasn't hard enough to serve the best DII players.
What is it like to be a Batman? wrote:I don't think it's too much to ask that people like me should be served by DII as well as players who only know high school clues.
What is it like to be a Batman? wrote:...it's entirely likely I was in the top few percent of people who actually played DII SCT.
I still think that even the top few percent should be challenged by a decent number of questions on DII sets -- particularly if, like me, they have really shallow general knowledge -- but that should be at best like fifth on the list of concerns when writing SCT, behind stuff like "providing questions that even total novices can get" and "making sure we differentiate between who should and shouldn't go to ICT" and stuff like that.
setht wrote:[really long post]
What is it like to be a Batman? wrote:I'm still a little concerned that a decent number of people thought, subjectively, that the DII SCT was a little too easy for them to fully enjoy it (and I don't think that saying "play DI" really resolves that issue), but I'll concede that I can't make an argument that it was too easy based on any kind of objective criteria.
EDIT: And there wouldn't have been a combined field if Auburn and Alabama B had elected to play D1 instead. You shouldn't generally be required to because players should stick around the circuit for D1 once their D2 eligibility is up, but if this set was too easy for you then you could have played D1 questions
jmannor2 wrote:Playing D2 was the most logical choice for Auburn considering the experience our team has. I am the only one who has years of experience playing pyramidal, while both Joseph and Neil pretty much started at the beginning of this academic year. And our other player literally started playing 3 weeks ago. I am certain that our choice to play D2 was the best choice.
The Hub (Gainesville, Florida) wrote:jmannor2 wrote:Playing D2 was the most logical choice for Auburn considering the experience our team has. I am the only one who has years of experience playing pyramidal, while both Joseph and Neil pretty much started at the beginning of this academic year. And our other player literally started playing 3 weeks ago. I am certain that our choice to play D2 was the best choice.
I agree that you should. My team isn't much different than yours and we had the same reason for playing D2. That being said, the region does need to work very hard on getting more D1 teams to play, because that was the problem here. If D2 teams find the set too easy they either qualify for ICT and become D1 eligible next year, or choose to play it anyway. With 2 D1 teams this year and 3 D2 teams who should qualify for ICT, I see no reason why you're region shouldn't have a D1 field next year.
Return to College area archives
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 5 guests