As anyone who has run a tournament on a SCOP set knows, I've been collecting conversion statistics from tournaments using the SCOP sets since I began writing them. The resulting data have been extremely useful to calibrating difficulty in SCOP sets, and I've been trying to find a good way to share them with the community. The result is this spreadsheet.
The conversion statistics in this spreadsheet represent only tossups from SCOP Novice 3 through SCOP Novice 7, and only tossups that were played in at least 20 rooms. Bonuses are excluded because it is often difficult to determine in which order a tournament used bonuses, and I'd rather not hand out potentially flawed data. The spreadsheet will be updated annually (with a gap for the SCOP A/B year, for which I don't have enough data), keeping three sets behind the current Novice set.
I strongly encourage anyone using this information to cross-reference it with the SCOP questions catalogued on QuizDB and quizbowlpackets.com, since the way a question is structured can make an enormous difference to how it plays to novices. I also recommend paying attention to the rounds these questions appeared in, since questions played in later rounds are usually played by, on average, stronger teams. As an example, a tossup on the Philippines in round 2 of SCOP6 was converted in 78% of rooms, but the same topic drew 95% conversion in round 10 of SCOP7; this could be because the SCOP7 tossup was more accessible or because rounds 10 and 11 are more often used as semifinals or finals packets.
I hope this will be as helpful to others as it has been to me.
SCOP Question Conversion For All
SCOP Question Conversion For All
Kristin Strey
SCOP
Head Coach, Winnebago High School (2014-)
Head Coach, Thurgood Marshall School (Rockford) (2022-)
Assistant Coach, IMSA (2010-2012)
Northern Illinois University Quiz Bowl Association founder
SCOP
Head Coach, Winnebago High School (2014-)
Head Coach, Thurgood Marshall School (Rockford) (2022-)
Assistant Coach, IMSA (2010-2012)
Northern Illinois University Quiz Bowl Association founder