aarcoh wrote:So I have to ask, what is gimmicky about powers? It rewards someone for having a deeper level of knowledge.
aarcoh wrote:But there's a difference if you get a tossup right through a buzzer race at the very end of the question as opposed to getting right unopposed early on in the question
cvdwightw wrote:The one thing that can be said that is good for powers outside of this artificial "excitement" is that it provides a second, complementary measure of a team's depth. Bonus conversion measures both breadth and depth of a team's knowledge; powers arguably measure how much of that is depth. If team A and team B each have 100 tossups and a bonus conversion of 15 over the course of the tournament, but 20 of team A's tossups are for power whereas 5 of team B's tossups are for power, I think it would be safe to say that team A is likely to have better depth than team B. Without power marks, team A and team B look roughly equivalent from a statistical point of view.
cvdwightw wrote:Also, that line of reasoning about "against good competition the former won't happen" is ridiculous, especially coming from someone who played at ACF Nationals, a tournament where THE FORMER HAPPENED ALL THE TIME in matches between two of the best teams in the nation.
cvdwightw wrote:If your team grabs 5 powers and 2 regular tossups and my team has only 2 powers but beats you to 8 buzzer races well after the power mark, then my team is probably going to win.
yoda4554 wrote:So this is my question (again, intended out of curiosity): in this type of situation, would people rather see the team that gets more tossups, but gets them relatively later in the question, win the game, or a team that gets fewer, but earlier on?
everyday847 wrote: But breadth is too important for a team that gets more points from tossups and bonuses to lose not because they didn't buzz before you did on science and history--because they did--but rather because they didn't buzz before some arbitrary standard.
yoda4554 wrote:The key word here is "arbitrary." There's an theory, often more true than it should be, that power placement is more or less arbitrary. But power placement should not be arbitrary, at least not by its very nature. I think that in most questions, there's a pretty definite place in the question--or at least an area of no more than a few words--where the material moves from "stuff that you need to have actually studied the material to know" to "stuff you might know if you've read a bunch of packets where this topic has come up."
Matt Weiner wrote:As people such as Jeff Hoppes have noted, this sort of grading becomes a more exact science as the difficulty level moves up. Who should know early clues for "Great Expectations" at a high school national championship? Probably about 4/5 of the teams. Who will know early clues for the Mysore Wars at a collegiate national championship? Maybe 2 or 3 teams.
everyday847 wrote:From NAQT's sample packet of IS 36A:
7. After settling in Hollywood in 1947, his interest in the Ramakrishna Mission produced mystical works
like The Doors of Perception. Sheryl Crow fans know he died in November 1963, which may have been 31
in the year of our (*) Ford. For 10 points—name this author who numbered years A.F. in his Brave New
World.
answer: Aldous (Leonard) Huxley
15. Austria recently netted around one billion dollars due to voiding the value of (*) schillings that were not
converted to this new unit. For 10 points—name this new currency used by Austria and eleven other
European nations.
answer: the euro [YOO-roh]
yoda4554 wrote:Iraq's King Faisal I had previously ruled this other country for a few months in 1920. Taken over by the Baath Party in 1963, its Hama Massacre was ordered by Hafez al-Assad [AH-sahd], who sent its army in Lebanon in 1976. Name this Arab nation with capital Damascus.
answer: _Syria_ or _Syrian Arab Republic_
Now, I don't know the abilities of JV teams well enough to say whether power should be before Assad or Lebanon, but I'd argue that knowing Faisal ruled Syria, that Syria is the other country Ba'ath took over, or where the Hama Massacre took place constitutes serious Syria knowledge for that level, something that would only be acquired via real studying, while the other clues fall into a category of things that can be associated with Syria from list or general knowledge. Obviously, at higher levels some of those early clues become more stock, and you'd want to either move them back or add something harder.
cvdwightw wrote:The fact that you were involved in a number of buzzer races a word or two after power at SCT implies that power placement was good. The "difficulty jump" stems from the length limit that makes it difficult to cram in all the hard, medium, and easy clues that your heart desires.
cvdwightw wrote:If you've got 4 lines of hard clues, and then some medium clues and a giveaway, then I don't see a problem with putting a power mark somewhere in line 4 or 5; on the other hand, if you get to your medium clues quickly, then a later power mark is bad, regardless of how many people actually buzz off your first couple of medium clues.
cvdwightw wrote:I honestly think that this "perfect tossup", where each clue gradually opens up a larger percentage of the field, is an ideal that will maybe be achieved a couple of times a tournament.
cvdwightw wrote:No question writer knows the exact field that will hear the question he's writing, and even if he did, no one knows the sum total of what that field knows. So we can't say "oh, 35% of the field knows this clue, 50% knows this clue, 75% knows this clue", because we don't know what the field knows. We make educated guesses based off where we get answers, where we see other people get answers, and where clues have shown up in previous packets.
cvdwightw wrote:]Putting clues that we assume a lot of people will know (names of main characters, famous commanders in battles, artist of certain paintings) in the beginning of tossups is bad, because we assume that the vast majority of the field will recognize those clues. That doesn't necessarily mean that the field will recognize them, just as putting in a supposedly hard clue at the beginning doesn't mean that people won't get it.
cvdwightw wrote:We have limited empirical evidence to work with, and we try the best we can, but this doesn't mean that a question that is answerable by 75% of the field in the middle of the question is somehow promoting bad quizbowl.
ILoveReeses wrote:The last few posts reminded me of the difference in what I consider is a "gimmick" in quiz bowl.
Variable-value tossups (likehas) are a gimmick. It renders moot any standard reward for skill at a game and gives victory more or less to "chance" in close matches.
As for powers, I will note that PACE powers are transparent powers. Everyone knows that after the reader says "for ten points," the value changes to ten. It is an attempt to reduce any arbitrary factors in powermark placement (because I prefer there be some more objectivity to the meaning of getting the power bonus points) while also helping teams focus on the fact the tossup is about to end. For my opinion, a powermark should be placed whenever one is confident that a critical number of teams (or percentile) should be able to buzz in before that clue and get the right answer. However, any geographic sample may skew the probability a team could get that answer. So could unscrupulous negbeasts. I have wondered whether I wanted negs with powers (which makes some sense to evaluate "tossup aggressiveness", and there are times I'm still not sure. But for sure, no one has figured out the "percentile" yet. Plus for a national tournament, adjusting for the field for the power points is difficult given the range in ability within the field.
everyday847 wrote:But is it appropriate to award ten more points for a buzz before the first word of the FTP clue? Either it is, and then there's a difficulty jump, or it isn't, because there's no difficulty jump. Or is your philosophy based on the idea that a certain proportion of teams should get an extra ten points on the tossup, in some sense as though they were given a thirty-five (or forty) point bonus, with a gimme part? I think that's valid except for the fact that the points assigned changes suddenly. If the number of points you get for a tossup declines from twenty to five constantly as it's read, maybe--but that's just impractical, as should be obvious.
everyday847 wrote:I don't think it's good, though, to have your model for where you place your power mark "before this mark, we have serious knowledge; after it, we have list knowledge." Or "before it, we have serious Syria knowledge; after it, we have less serious knowledge." Either you have a tossup with a big jump in difficulty / non-specialist answerability, or you have a tossup (one I'd call good) with an even decline in difficulty, where placing a power mark is an arbitrary exercise--do you place the power mark where 0% of teams will know the answer (before the first word), 5%, 10%, etc.?
yoda4554 wrote:But the thing is, knowledge is rarely a continuous spectrum over the domain of players. In fact, it can't be, because the domain of players is discrete; by necessity, there must be a sort of punctuated dropping off. For example, let's say there's an HS question on Daisy Miller. If you've read it, you know lots of things about it, including the basic structure of the scenes, various quotes, names of minor characters, etc. etc. But if you've not read it, you probably only know that it's the Henry James novella where the girl goes to Rome and gets sick at the Colosseum; if you've studied a bit more, maybe you know the name of the guy we follow around, Winterbourne.
Now let's say two teams are playing, both of whom have a player who's read the book: it's easy enough to write a question that rewards the player who remembers it better. It's even easier with one, and you can probably arrange it so that that player gets power. But what if no one's read it? Then we have to distinguish between who's studied more, and that's not very easy. Why? Because there are only a couple stock facts that a non-reader will know. It's pretty likely that both teams in that situation are going to know exactly the same amount of stuff about the book, and race to pick up the question there. It is thus necessary that there will be a drop-off at Winterbourne, power or not. And since this is the case, placing a power there seems a good way to acknowledge that.
everyday847 wrote:yoda4554 wrote:But the thing is, knowledge is rarely a continuous spectrum over the domain of players. In fact, it can't be, because the domain of players is discrete; by necessity, there must be a sort of punctuated dropping off. For example, let's say there's an HS question on Daisy Miller. If you've read it, you know lots of things about it, including the basic structure of the scenes, various quotes, names of minor characters, etc. etc. But if you've not read it, you probably only know that it's the Henry James novella where the girl goes to Rome and gets sick at the Colosseum; if you've studied a bit more, maybe you know the name of the guy we follow around, Winterbourne.
Now let's say two teams are playing, both of whom have a player who's read the book: it's easy enough to write a question that rewards the player who remembers it better. It's even easier with one, and you can probably arrange it so that that player gets power. But what if no one's read it? Then we have to distinguish between who's studied more, and that's not very easy. Why? Because there are only a couple stock facts that a non-reader will know. It's pretty likely that both teams in that situation are going to know exactly the same amount of stuff about the book, and race to pick up the question there. It is thus necessary that there will be a drop-off at Winterbourne, power or not. And since this is the case, placing a power there seems a good way to acknowledge that.
I think it'd be very difficult to write a Daisy Miller tossup that I couldn't fraud for your idea of power by reading Masterplots and memorizing every character name and some memorable quotes. I surely believe that it's possible, however--but we can't make policy based on every Daisy Miller tossup being That One Perfect Tossup.
And really, I again don't see why power divides "serious knowledge" from "I just read a list" considering that I think as small a part of the tossup as possible should reward anything but serious knowledge; having a power there is a sort of concession.
evilmonkey wrote:If you did power by this definition, it would almost necessitate the elimination of common link tossups
yoda4554 wrote:evilmonkey wrote:If you did power by this definition, it would almost necessitate the elimination of common link tossups
Why?
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