Matt Weiner wrote:I don't see any reason why we need bad questions in order to attract new players.
SrgtDonow wrote:I find often the subject matter can be more prohibitive than the question format to new teams, tossups of any length about asian lit or fine arts are scarier than the longest tossup on George Washington or Skyrim or Cellular Respiration.
Matt Weiner wrote:I'm not saying anything about last year's NHBB regionals in particular, since I haven't even seen those questions and don't know how long they were, what sort of clues they used, or anything else about them. I'm just saying that "a good two-line tossup" is an oxymoron, and that, empirically, the notion that tabula rasa teams will prefer bad questions to good ones is not true in my experience.
nationalhistorybeeandbowl wrote:Matt Weiner wrote:I'm not saying anything about last year's NHBB regionals in particular, since I haven't even seen those questions and don't know how long they were, what sort of clues they used, or anything else about them. I'm just saying that "a good two-line tossup" is an oxymoron, and that, empirically, the notion that tabula rasa teams will prefer bad questions to good ones is not true in my experience.
Btw, Sam, Alec Johnsson wrote a bunch of 1.5-2 line tossups in a game where I took on everyone on White Plains and Ardsley combined at the end of Omar last year. I, for one, had a great time playing this, and enjoyed the novel experience of playing on short questions that were still pyramidal (they had about 6 facts on average) with good answer choices. Then again, I was always comparably very quick on the buzzer among people with comparable knowledge bases when I played in the 1990's.
nationalhistorybeeandbowl wrote:Btw, Sam, Alec Johnsson wrote a bunch of 1.5-2 line tossups in a game where I took on everyone on White Plains and Ardsley combined at the end of Omar last year. I, for one, had a great time playing this, and enjoyed the novel experience of playing on short questions that were still pyramidal (they had about 6 facts on average) with good answer choices. Then again, I was always comparably very quick on the buzzer among people with comparable knowledge bases when I played in the 1990's.
nationalhistorybeeandbowl wrote: Thus including 2 line tossups in that at some level wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing or a threat to good quizbowl.
nationalhistorybeeandbowl wrote:Here's a better question: why isn't this tournament posted online? When is it? Or did somehow escape me?
Smuttynose Island wrote:nationalhistorybeeandbowl wrote:Here's a better question: why isn't this tournament posted online? When is it? Or did somehow escape me?
As Matt said the four quarter format that HSAPQ produces for VHSL Districts, Regionals and States is posted every year. It can be found here: http://www.hsapq.com/questions/17/
Coldblueberry wrote:Being good at Quizbowl has nothing to do with intelligence--it just takes hard work as long as you start out with an average memory.
Fortitudo Bologna wrote:counterpoint: I do not understand how to correctly make a post
dyetman89 wrote:Coldblueberry wrote:Being good at Quizbowl has nothing to do with intelligence--it just takes hard work as long as you start out with an average memory.
Statements such as this (or some variation) always seem to crop up when this topic is periodically resurrected. Now, at first blush I'm not even sure how we'd go about falsifying this; so long as we want for a working definition of "intelligence," we're both blowing smoke. But let's take Paul Stoetzer's study of the correlation between MEAP scores and what he somewhat nebulously labels "quiz bowl success": viewtopic.php?f=20&t=1608&p=21786#p21786
SPOILER ALERT: turns out that good Michigan qbers make mincemeat of the statewide standardized test. Alas, I'm not aware of any other comparable study, but there's a wealth of anecdotal evidence suggesting that "quizbowl ability," whatever it is, and however amenable to drilling and preparation it might be, is hardly uncorrelated with success at other activities traditionally associated with "the intellect." If you're fortunate enough to indulge in a spring or summer break with zero demands on your time (recommended, btw), spend a few hours googling the names of great highschool and collegiate quizbowlers of the past and present - start with, say, the Panasonic all-stars. The record of academic and professional achievement is astounding - my cursory overview suggests that they've pursued doctorates at approximately a gazillion times base-rate expectations. When investigating recent highschool standouts by similar methods (and gazing hungrily at Rob Carson's meta-knowledge crown), I encountered a cavalcade of National Merit [what have you]s, AP Scholars, valedictorians, and apple-polishers of every description.
Furthermore, Justin, if were a $10,000 betting man, I'd wager that the percentage of seniors on the Torrey Pines qb team who achieve some level of National Merit recognition is higher than the percentage of the school as a whole achieving such recognition; I'd further wager that the mean number of AP tests taken by Torry Pines qbers by the date of graduation is higher than the mean number taken by the Torrey Pines student body. Obviously there are plenty of variables here, and plenty of ambiguities (not the least of which is our admittedly ambiguous definition of "intelligence," which we all could dicker over for decades), but the anecdotal correlations strike me as too great to ignore.
Joshua Rutsky wrote:We do, however, have 35 people regularly coming to practice and enjoying themselves.
Wow, holy crap. CR is a school of 2000 kids and we struggle to get more than 6 students to ever come to practice because of all their other activities. How the heck do you get 35 kids to show up to a practice? We can never split practice up because one room would have 2 kids in
Our middle schools refuse to play quizbowl here, no matter what information i give them or what tournaments i tell them about. I even had a student ask a teacher here, who is the wife of the principal of one of our middle schools, to talk to her husband about a team. He had no interest. I do not know what else to do about this.Joshua Rutsky wrote:1) Host a middle school event every year. I make sure I get face time with our middle school feeder school teams every year as host of the state Middle School Championship. It is a lot of extra work, but we make about $1000 on the event after snack and t-shirt sales, and the kids know who I am as a result. I've also invited our MS teams to come to a scrimmage with our JV once a year to give them a feel for what the "big leagues" are like. Those 9th graders are coming in to a brand new, huge school and are looking for places to drop anchor and feel a part of things--I just facilitate that.
List of villages in West Virginia wrote:Our middle schools refuse to play quizbowl here, no matter what information i give them or what tournaments i tell them about. I even had a student ask a teacher here, who is the wife of the principal of one of our middle schools, to talk to her husband about a team. He had no interest. I do not know what else to do about this.Joshua Rutsky wrote:1) Host a middle school event every year. I make sure I get face time with our middle school feeder school teams every year as host of the state Middle School Championship. It is a lot of extra work, but we make about $1000 on the event after snack and t-shirt sales, and the kids know who I am as a result. I've also invited our MS teams to come to a scrimmage with our JV once a year to give them a feel for what the "big leagues" are like. Those 9th graders are coming in to a brand new, huge school and are looking for places to drop anchor and feel a part of things--I just facilitate that.
whitesoxfan wrote:
One thing you might want to try if you find a lack of interest: Flip the usual order, and have some success before building a foundation. Success tends to get people interested in joining up. Unfortunately, there's a possibility that still no one will be interested, and it's hard to get success unless you hit some lucky players.
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