The Quizbowl Resource Center

KMO scores/rankings won't be posted until Friday (I think), but how did everyone do? RM got 1741 and I believe Blair got 1728 (EDIT: I'm wrong).

Feel free to also critique this year's KMO/its existence in general, or to rail against the establishment that is the oppressive Knowledge Master Open. Whichever you prefer.

Edit number 2: State College got 1812

We got 1723, which was lower that what we'd hoped for. I hate KMO, i'm not really sure why, but I just have a general disgust for the format, the questions, and the puns. Especially the puns.

blazer06 wrote:Especially the puns.

LMAO, we dont do the HS version but in middle school i remember them trying to be funny...

TJ got 1845.

There seemed to be fewer horrible jokes this year, but maybe that's because the person we have using the computer immediately skipped any joke screen (to avoid having to see the puns).

dschafer wrote: There seemed to be fewer horrible jokes this year, but maybe that's because the person we have using the computer immediately skipped any joke screen (to avoid having to see the puns).

I made our typist do that. I would also scream expletives at the screen when they came up; the other seniors would also scream expletives at the underclassmen if they paid attention to them.

AUKspletives?

NoahMinkCHS wrote:AUKspletives?

That deserves a slap in the face, at the very least.

I would vouch for a flogging, but I got sick of Auk jokes three years ago after my first KMO.

Never played KMO, but I still feel compelled to note that you may want to vouch for a flAUKing instead...

My apologies.

Next auk joke results in a ban.

I must disagree with the views on the KMO. I love coaching the KMO and my teams have always enjoyed them. The KMO is the only time the team can work as a "team". I love having them work together to find the correct answer. The time outs are perfect for discussion and laughs. The questions are generally very good. A good mixture of easy and challenging. Must quiz always be so competitive that you forget to laugh? The puns, hey if you allow your selves to have fun with them they are great. My teams laugh and groan right along with them. They are meant to be silly, to have you laugh at them and I believe with them. The school allows me to buy a few pizzas and some cola and we make an afternoon of it.
I suggest that you guys chill and enjoy it.
Thanks,
Michael Harvey
American Community School
Abu Dhabi, UAE

dschafer wrote:TJ got 1845.

There seemed to be fewer horrible jokes this year, but maybe that's because the person we have using the computer immediately skipped any joke screen (to avoid having to see the puns).

Would scrolling through the joke screen let you answer faster and thus increase your score? (I know you're on some sort of clock, but I'm not 100% sure how it works.)

These scores are absolutely insane!!! My team does exceedingly well in real competition, but stinks it up at the KMO. I think we scored around 1250 this time.

I think this is one instance where being underclassmen does hurt them. It seemed to be the law/economics and math that they were struggling with. They also missed a lot of the science questions on the first try. I think that they will do well on the KMO when they are seniors. However, I can't imagine them EVER scoring 1800+, that's just incredible.

Also, I'd like to address the honor system that is necessary in the KMO. I'm certainly not accusing anyone on this board of being dishonest. However, I had a student last year who had transferred from a school that always does very well on the KMO. After our fall contest, he asked me why I never helped them on the questions they didn't know like his old coach did... He informed me that his old coach would give them clues and sometimes just flat out tell them the answers. There have been several reports of teams doing this in our area, and some schools have quit doing the KMO because of this.

While I'm sure this is rare, I can't help but wonder how many coaches and/or teams are "bending" the competition rules on the KMO.

Anyway, though, congrats to everyone who has posted their scores on this thread so far. I'm in absolute awe of those incredible scores.

I would be very surprised if any of the top 50 teams had this sort of assistance. Of course, if the teacher is inclined to give this sort of "help", then it's on the teacher's conscience on whether he/she adheres to the "honor code." Besides, how does one actually enforce such an honor code for KMO?

Again, KMO is nice in that a lot of teams can get exposure to questions, but unless there is some measure of security or proctoring, one cannot really put too much weight into it.

Michael: High School Celebrity Shoot (which I push because I created it) is a unique team-oriented competition that is run like a track meet rather than a match play competition. In the years I've run this event, teachers and students have positively commented on how laid back the competition is (partly because it's the staff that do all the work).

Of course, having been involved for the past half-year with Kaplan, I would be interested in seeing if KMO could provide computer-adaptive quizzes: that is to say, the difficulty of the test adjusts to the test-takers. I'd also see if KMO could hold its test online rather than on disk. Am I so outdated that it is online now?

Raleigh Charter had 1728. It's so painful to watch the kids talk themselves out of right answers. You do learn a lot about your team by watching those kids who swear up and down they KNOW they are right and then aren't. I know of at least 3 questions we tanked on because of that.

Oh--but the "EULA" thing at the beginning about not letting adults talk during the session, etc--that is a step up from previous years. Perhaps the officials are becoming suspicious, too? I don't doubt at all that TJ and SC can get 1800+, and I personally think that cheating is probably pretty rare.

The only team I know of that was caught cheating is, I believe, Seneca Valley from Montgomery County, Maryland in the early 1990s. Apparently one of their players pretended to be some random school and ordered a disk without his coach's knowledge. He then went through the disk and looked up all the answers before his team officially took the KMO.

bigtrain wrote:The only team I know of that was caught cheating is, I believe, Seneca Valley from Montgomery County, Maryland in the early 1990s. Apparently one of their players pretended to be some random school and ordered a disk without his coach's knowledge. He then went through the disk and looked up all the answers before his team officially took the KMO.

Wow. That's devious. I really don't think my team cares enough about the KMO to do that (not that they would if they did care). They're biggest incentive seems to be that they get out of class for a couple of hours. Personally, I'm much more interested on how they do 1-on-1 against teams on the buzzers. However, it is interesting to see them do the KMO. It really shows their weaknesses. I've also noticed that a WHOLE lot of the KMO has to do with common sense - something that my team completely lacks. This is evident by the fact that they actually put that Martha Stewart was a cannibal on yesterday's KMO... Basically because they didn't really pay attention to what was being asked.

quizbowllee wrote:

bigtrain wrote:The only team I know of that was caught cheating is, I believe, Seneca Valley from Montgomery County, Maryland in the early 1990s. Apparently one of their players pretended to be some random school and ordered a disk without his coach's knowledge. He then went through the disk and looked up all the answers before his team officially took the KMO.

Wow. That's devious.

It's also rather unintelligent. There were and are much easier ways to cheat.

I always go through a strategic spiel prior to doing a KMO, mostly to make sure the students are familiar with what is going to happen and understand that I will be doing nothing more than sitting on the side of the room keeping a running score tally just in case something crashes.

I suppose I could understand (if I tried really, really hard) providing hints as long as they were being used as an instructional tool and the school's score wasn't submitted or wasn't high enough to have any significant meaning. I can't imagine ever doing it myself, though. It doesn't send the sportsmanship message that needs to be sent. Just because high school students know the difference between right and wrong doesn't mean that difference doesn't need to be reinforced.

So as I keep learning more about computer-based tests...

So do you all keep the old KMO disks/tests? Do you go through them before the real "test day" so that the students know what to expect (including all the puns)? It may be interesting to see how reliable the scores are.

I keep the old disks. Depending on what else we have going on, and the relative importance of KMO at that time, I may spend some time with my students on an old disk or two.

Also, I'd like to address the honor system that is necessary in the KMO. I'm certainly not accusing anyone on this board of being dishonest. However, I had a student last year who had transferred from a school that always does very well on the KMO. After our fall contest, he asked me why I never helped them on the questions they didn't know like his old coach did... He informed me that his old coach would give them clues and sometimes just flat out tell them the answers. There have been several reports of teams doing this in our area, and some schools have quit doing the KMO because of this.

Er. . . did this not concern anyone? I mean, I imagine some teams out of 850 are going to cheat, mostly in smaller ways (such as getting help from a coach). But it's still really wrong, and I suppose I'd always imagined that teams that did that had coaches who couldn't stand to see their weaker years debate what the first amemdment was. The idea that any school is cheating on the KMO is disappointing, but not outright surprising, at least not to me. However, if the teams that do "well," by whatever score range you want to use to define that, regularly cheat, then to me that is a SERIOUS problem, particularly if the coaches are involved. Considering that most, though not all, coaches are teachers, this is even more concerning.

I'm not sure I'd advocate ratting anyone out, and it probably could never be proved anyway. But if I had firsthand knowledge like that of organized cheating on a team that regularly is a competitor at the KMO, I feel like I'd have to report it.

Also, if you're going to cheat, why not use google or something? It's not like there aren't much more productive ways to cheat, and it certainly isn't like they'd be any less underhanded. . .

StPickrell wrote:

dschafer wrote:TJ got 1845.

There seemed to be fewer horrible jokes this year, but maybe that's because the person we have using the computer immediately skipped any joke screen (to avoid having to see the puns).

Would scrolling through the joke screen let you answer faster and thus increase your score? (I know you're on some sort of clock, but I'm not 100% sure how it works.)

The timer starts when you begin the next question; there is a 15 second break between questions, and skipping the joke screen just cuts short the 15 second break. So, the only advantage is avoiding the potential distraction that a Auk pun might be.

Scores are now available at the KMO website. This year's mean is 1253. Here are the top 10:
Patrick King

Assuming it's out of 200 questions, I'm curious which one question was missed by TJ, State College, and Richard Montgomery. I wonder if the same one tripped up more than one of these teams or what happened. Anyone care to share?

I don't remember the exact wording, but we missed the one on Mexican geography, and distances between cities.

Notjustolddeadwhiteguys wrote:I don't remember the exact wording, but we missed the one on Mexican geography, and distances between cities.

Oh yeah, that one about which cities were farthest from Cabo and some other city. We said Cancun/Cozumel, which was decidedly wrong. I think we also guessed Ciudad Juarez and some other border city, but that's cuz we'd never heard of any of the other ones.

i think we (state college) missed the one about outlaws operating in the same state...

We (Danville) didn't do as well we had hoped to this year, some of which we were expecting (last year we had one phenomenal senior who was a big factor in our sucess), some of which had to do with me making mistakes as computer operator, and some of which had to do with what we felt were harder questions. I'm curious how other teams felt about the difficulty of this year's disk relative to past competitions?

Looking just at the numbers:

2004 Fall: Mean 1271, Max 1849
2005 Spring Mean 1172, Max 1824
2005 Fall Mean 1253, Max 1845

It appears that this one was less difficult than last year's spring contest. Personally, I didn't see much of a difference either way in difficulty between this year and last year. Perhaps the distribution changed?