NASAT 2016: General Discussion

[Cheynem]

Thanks to everyone for playing NASAT this year--hope it was enjoyable for the state all-stars and anybody else who plays the set.

I'd like to thank our writers and editors. The top ten people who wrote questions this year were:
me (Mike Cheyne, 82/147), Kurtis Droge (52/33), Eddie Kim (34/31), Auroni Gupta (31/30), Joelle Smart (22/19), Kenji Golimlim (21/19), Nick Collins (22/16), Ike Jose (19/13), Cody Voight (22/7), and Rohith Nagari (7/18).
Our editors were Tommy Casalaspi (literature), Jordan Brownstein (history), Auroni Gupta (fine arts), Cody Voight and Joelle Smart (science), and a combo of those people for RMP and social science. I was overall chief editor and am responsible for the set's content. I'd also really like to thank Ike Jose and Ophir Lifshitz for offering last-minute assistance and feedback despite not being HSAPQ members.

Use this thread for general discussion of the set, including overall content, difficulty, likes, dislikes, etc.

[Auroni]

I edited this tournament's arts and myth. I largely deputized Eddie Kim, who has a preternatural command of the classical music canon and what people might be expected to know about it, to complete the auditory arts section. I took a laissez-faire approach to editing the mythology, which was chock full of interesting and creative submissions. My approach to editing the visual arts is detailed in this thread.

One constant across my categories is that I treated the playing audience as adults, even though this is a high school tournament. I tested the same level of academic engagement and knowledge as would be tested at ACF Regionals or an equivalent set. This included several areas not normally tested by high school quizbowl questions. This may have had some negative consequences (the film, for instance, seemed too hard for the audience, even though major films/directors/techniques were covered). However, I was generally thrilled to see the level of knowledge and skill on display.

[ashwin99]

Are there any stats for tossup/bonus conversion per subject? I felt like the science was unusually hard and I'm wondering if the stats reflect that.

[John Ketzkorn]

What's with the lack of love for novels in this set? It felt like poetry and plays dominated a majority of the literature answer lines.

[Cheynem]

Literature Breakdown

This is the breakdown of the literature tossups. By my count, there were more tossups on novels than plays or poetry, although I don't know how they were randomized (so you may have hit most of the non novel ones earlier).

Novels: 29 (Cat's Cradle, Roth, Fitzgerald, Henderson, The Moviegoer, Wise Blood, Chandler, Color Purple, Maggie, All the King's Men, Absalom Absalom, Billy, Trollope, Power and the Glory, Prime of MIss Jean Brodie, Mansfield Park, The Good Soldier, Winston Smith, G.K. Chesterton, Turgenev, Lord Jim, The Tin Drum, The Human Comedy, Svejk, France, Love in the Time of Cholera, Carpentier, Disgrace, Mexico)
Plays: 18 (Inge, Streetcar, Pittsburgh, Keller, Hickey, Mamet, Ford, Measure for Measure, Caesar, Verona, Italian, The Master Builder, Genet, Terence, The Seagull, Medea, House of Bernarda Alba, Master Harold and the Boys)
Short Stories: 6 (O. Henry, Hemingway, Scandal in Bohemia, Monkey's Paw, Maupassant, Mansfield)
Poetry: 27 (Wallace Stevens, When Lilacs Last..., William Carlos Williams, For the Union Dead, Holmes, Millay, Bradstreet, Mending Wall, September 1 1939, Larkin, Byron, Ulysses, Owen, Heaney, Hardy, Herbert, Reading Gaol, Wordsworth, Easter 1916, St. Petersburg, Paradiso, Baudelaire, Lorelei, Neruda, Marti, Walcott, flowers)
Various: 6 (Rosenberg--mostly play, China, Oklahoma--mostly play, Welty, Cheever, vampires--mostly novel)

[sharkcrossing]

Will this set be posted some time soon? Are there mirrors of this that haven't been read?