The Quizbowl Resource Center

nobthehobbit

1.) I'm a fan of doing the four-quarter system because then it helps divide out the talents of the teams - some teams might be faster in tossups, but lacking in teamwork/communication, where as other teams might be better in lightning rounds/bonus consultations, but be slow to buzz. Catering to a m...

nobthehobbit

1.) The issue came up before about using posted questions. It was said before, “The whole point of the set is to get teams that are relatively inexperienced at pyramidal quizbowl (i.e. a fair number of teams in Vermont and New Hampshire) to play on a pyramidal quizbowl set that is nearly 100% acces...

nobthehobbit

1.) Our club (college included) is in such a financial bind that it would be VERY hard to find other sources of questions in time for a late October/early November tournament. Though I haven't looked too in-depth like I probably should, my intention for this tournament is to be DIFFERENT than the s...

nobthehobbit

I just noticed that this date is the same as that for HFT V.

nobthehobbit

bt_green_warbler wrote:"Previous td experience" is easy for us to find out without asking hosts to fill out another field... because we have a large database of previous tournament directors.

Speaking of which, is there any plan to implement the "co-TD" system that was suggested after SCT last year?

nobthehobbit

So just a few notes I want to make on this: ...discount for bringing over a certain number of fans to support a team. Quizbowl isn't a spectator activity; those fans would be better off playing or, if they're not in high school, helping to staff. In any event, I'm not sure you'd want to encourage th...

nobthehobbit

bt_green_warbler wrote:Least-converted:

-3
---10% conversion---
[snip]

Is this a typo or an actual tossup (and if so, what was it)?

nobthehobbit

A college tournament on a high school set! Good thing this is no longer a (potential) ANGST mirror. I seem to recall that ECSO was originally planned as a college tournament on a high school set. Regardless, given that it's quite likely that the number of actual college players who are going to be ...

nobthehobbit

Hopefully, Woburn will be able to field a team. What's gonna be the difficulty level for this tournament? Also, has a date been set? I can most likely attend, but we'll have to see about the others. The target difficulty level is something a bit higher than ACF Fall, as per the original post. The 2...

nobthehobbit

Are people sending packets to Andy? If so, it'd be mildly amusing if come the day of the tournament, there were multiple sets built from the same submitted packets.

nobthehobbit

What I found to be a bad idea was tossups in one set on Clifford Odets and "The Medium Is the Message" [the latter of which I only got because I had written a tossup on McLuhan for Penn Bowl]. I don't know if you have conversion rates for either, but I imagine they would both be very low....

nobthehobbit

I agree that Option #3 is good within boundaries. I'm uncomfortable with something being 1.5% during the season and 5% at HSNCT because teams that play primarily IS during the year are going to get the sense that the category is unimportant and are not going to get significant experience answering ...

nobthehobbit

It's hard to imagine Charter not being able to travel. It's only one year removed from double National Championships. Very very puzzling!!! Not when the principial is bent on denying the team funds. Apparently, academic teams will only get funding for in-state ventures, which doesn't amount to much...

nobthehobbit

Option #3 is best (even if only in the sense of "least of all evils") IMO: Qualifiers and nationals have different purposes. Qualifiers pick out the teams that are "good enough" to be given a shot at nationals. Nationals pick out the best team. (This applies equally to IS/HSNCT a...

nobthehobbit

Captain Sinico wrote:Right, Jonah, but if the packets were available for free and freely redistributable, they'd appear on the archives more or less immediately, rendering the NAQT site issues moot.

Or, NAQT might choose to send them directly to George and the Stanford Archive, thereby circumventing the issue.

nobthehobbit

What was the original rationale for having so much trash in college packets? Are there college teams that will stop playing if there's no trash to make NAQT accessible? That seems even less likely in college than in HS. I know that RIT is in the minority, but I'd likely have to go to SCT by myself ...

nobthehobbit

Didn't RIT have some problems with this when they first started? Or am I misremembering things (as usual)?

nobthehobbit

1) Eliminate Computation and Miscellaneous 2) Reduce Geography and PC/Sports 3) Increase Social Science, RMP, and Fine Arts I think these are all unlikely, unfortunately; in all but math comp's case, from examining conversion rates (though those suggest that perhaps sports should be decreased withi...

nobthehobbit

It's all the small decimals there that are throwing me off, I suppose. Just to take a couple of categories where the math is relatively straightforward: There's 17/16 physics in the SCT, for 1.1/1.0 per packet. That's 1/1 physics in each of 15 rounds, and 2/1 physics in the other one. American lite...

nobthehobbit

It is an interesting hypothesis that there might be a feedback loop at work here (the best teams play fewer IS sets, leading to lower conversion rates for fine arts, leading NAQT to resist increasing that category, repeat). (But note that most of the data I posted is several years old, before HSAPQ...

nobthehobbit

Some initial thoughts: The higher conversion rate on popular culture over sports suggests to me that (as I've advocated elsewhere) sports should be reduced, perhaps brought to the same weight as the TV, Music and Film parts. (As I noted in the collegiate thread, CULT has equal weights for sports, mu...

nobthehobbit

2. One criticism I've seen about NAQT sets is that there is (apparently; I apologize if I'm wrong on this) no guaranteed per-pack distribution. Could NAQT publish such? I'm not sure I understand; how would this be different from the "per packet" column of the existing distribution page ? ...

nobthehobbit

Just curious: as I understand it, hosts can ask for an IS set with the comp math removed. Are those questions replaced, or are they simply excised (so that Science ends up with a top-level 69/66)? Also (for anyone here not looking at the collegiate thread), I made a few notes concerning both HS and ...

nobthehobbit

For myself, I don't see a problem with trash lit in SCT provided that it's in the PC_Sports section of the distribution (rather than the Literature part) and is scaled accordingly with its top-level category. I don't have a problem with trash lit being in Misc_PC. If it's in Misc_Lit (or any other p...

nobthehobbit

Wait, having two question vendors producing high quality sets of varying difficulty using an almost-ubiquitously accepted distribution would be a bad thing? I don't get what you're saying here-- NAQT has to keep all the crap because otherwise there would be two companies selling good (albeit distri...

nobthehobbit

Is this for comments all NAQT tournaments' distributions; that is, does it also cover the HSNCT distribution (about which Jonah has ninja'd me) and the SCT/ICT distribution ? Also, I hope this doesn't become yet another "comp math/trash/geography/CE/mixed-impure-academic sucks and NAQT should g...

nobthehobbit

I have little idea what's going on excepting what I've read here, but I've heard nothing from Andy since March 17 (about anything), despite my offers to, at the least, double-check the set for stuff like repeats (which, when I first made the offer, he said he'd be glad to have someone doing). EDIT: ...

nobthehobbit

PAC did a good job of getting the state legislatures involved as they had connections to them already. Thus, a lot of teams were paid by their state to go to PAC. In contrast, NASAT does not have such connections yet (correct me if I'm wrong). So in the absence of state funding, fundraising does be...

nobthehobbit

So, I do not think there is any reason for complaint; instead I think the committee has earned some well deserved kudos. Of course if I am missing something, I would not mind learning what it is. This is not a criticism of the seeding process, but one must be skeptical in comparing seedings to fina...

nobthehobbit

Some stuff I noticed in the math(-ish stuff) (which is all I can really comment on): Round 4, TU 11: To my knowledge, it's either l'Hospital or l'Hôpital, not l'Hôspital. Round 4, Bonus 11: Catalan's conjecture was proven almost ten years ago. Round 5, TU 14: "...a simple, closed curve divides ...

nobthehobbit

There's a small error in the stats: the Kentucky-Texas game is listed as having had zero tossups heard.

nobthehobbit

Hilltopper22 wrote:
SoLegit12 wrote:This makes my state format seem amazing
*SHIVERS*
In some places, this is the state format!

I'm tempted to say that Reach for the Top makes this look amazing.

nobthehobbit

Sounds like that rumored "improvement" in NAC was completely bogus. I can't believe coaches still voluntarily take their teams to this. Whether it's the disrespect towards players, the horrible questions, or the hilarious arrogance Chip himself demonstrates, there's basically nothing rede...

nobthehobbit

I know it's probably already been stated, but it would be really amazing (though I guess not altogether implausible at all?) if Pennsylvania (read: State College) won this. Anyways, I wish the best of luck to Team Illinois... and all other teams, for that matter. It would've been even more amazing ...

nobthehobbit

So as an add-on to what I said earlier about the varying approaches to bonus difficulty: Looking through the stats, I'd say PACE got the PGA approach (let teams score points!) right. Not every team should be getting 20 PPB, but getting more than 60% of top-flight teams there (11 of 16 in prelims, 10...

nobthehobbit

I actually really wish we'd see more academic current events in college tournaments, and I don't at all agree that it's inherently a bad idea. My comment above was limited to packet-submission events. (I've seen the combination of mandatory current events plus the well known tendency of last-minute...

nobthehobbit

I am a huge proponent of well-written current events questions and I believe the NSC should have more of them than it did this past year, and that they should come up more in college quiz bowl. The issue with current events (and honestly, geography too) is that people keep writing crappy questions ...

nobthehobbit

Re: Chris's comments on bonus conversion: This issue reminds me of a quote from someone in the USGA regarding the difficulty of the U.S. Open (Oh no! Sports analogies!): (perhaps not exact) "We're not trying to embarrass the best golfers in the world. We're trying to identify them." One co...

nobthehobbit

Apart from anything else, I don't like bouncebacks for the simple reason that I don't think there should ever be a reason not to answer a tossup. Without bouncebacks, the only reason I can think of not to answer a tossup is when ties are broken by PPB and you know that answering a tossup and failing...

nobthehobbit

It's for novice tournaments: the sum of the grade levels of your team members must be less than 40. So hypothetically three people from State College can attend as a team? Yeah, the spirit of the rule is, I think, "average of the grade levels must be less than 10". Maybe this should be th...

nobthehobbit

It's for novice tournaments: the sum of the grade levels of your team members must be less than 40. So hypothetically three people from State College can attend as a team? Yeah, the spirit of the rule is, I think, "average of the grade levels must be less than 10". Maybe this should be th...

nobthehobbit

* Another problem with this idea is the ranking of the teams. Doing this will cause teams that are generally unknown due to either geographic isolation or infrequent playing of NAQT tournaments to be incorrectly seeded. The most prevalent example of this would be the California team that each year ...

nobthehobbit

And Trevor's saying that you can just draw up a set of rules like "odd teams lose to odd teams and the team one lower than their number and beat all other even teams" and something analogous for even teams that assigns each team the necessary wins and losses. But yeah: this is not especia...

nobthehobbit

(Note: I haven't checked whether the "all teams at 5-5" scenario is possible, at least beyond the trivial "total wins = total losses" necessary condition.) Such a scenario is always (theoretically) possible in a round robin with an odd number of teams. Yes. I meant that I hadn't...

nobthehobbit

The 3rd teams in each bracket are seeded 41-59, with the 4th teams seeded 60-78. These two sets make up the initial "loser's bracket." So if one group of eleven finishes with the top three teams in a "circle of death" at 9-1 each, one of them is relegated to the loser's bracket?...

nobthehobbit

The 3rd teams in each bracket are seeded 41-59, with the 4th teams seeded 60-78. These two sets make up the initial "loser's bracket." So if one group of eleven finishes with the top three teams in a "circle of death" at 9-1 each, one of them is relegated to the loser's bracket?...

nobthehobbit

Hey, sorry for reviving a dead thread, but I just had a brief question--I noticed a lot of statements in the discussions of VETO about how VETO XI (edited by Jerry Vinokurov, etc.) was much easier than previous iterations of the tournament, but I don't seem to be able to find any statistical verifi...

nobthehobbit

So this whole discussion of "fair" and "unfair" and "less than maximally fair" et cetera inspired in me an idea of what might be most fair, but it's far too crazy. (The following is not it. It is probably crazy, but not as crazy.) Quite simply, when you've got 200 teams...

nobthehobbit

Is this true? Economics (at least micro, I don't think we did macro) was a required senior-year course at my high school, and since there appears to be a good rationale behind making it a required course (functional high school graduate should have some basic idea of how the marketplace operates), ...

nobthehobbit

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but in previous incarnations of NSC, a power was anything before FTP. Blind powers are what most conventional tournaments use. Yes. The idea is that you don't know where the power mark is in a question. (And, of course, some tournaments don't use powers at all, but ...

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