Cross-disciplinary giveaways and IS-76
Posted: Tue Mar 10, 2009 7:44 pm
My last look at cross-disciplinary giveaways in NAQT questions examined the 2009 SCT and so was posted on the password-protected board for that tournament.
Recently the question was asked here: the cute giveaway may be dying at the college level, but how prevalent is it in NAQT's IS sets?
So I took a look through IS-76. (Chosen as the most recent IS set clear for public discussion.)
Like any other IS set, this one contained 360 tossups.
15 are GK, which can't have a cdg (they're already supposed to be multi-disciplinary).
26 are computation, which typically don't do this. (I guess it's possible to write a tossup of the form ...divide 17 by 2 and you'll get--for 10 points--this result that also names a Federico Fellini-directed film... but I feel comfortable asserting that this doesn't happen very often even without having actually checked the math in this set.)
That leaves 319 tossups, of which 21 had cross-disciplinary giveaways (6.58%). Surprisingly, this set actually had fewer of these than the 2009 SCT (30/339, 7.5%).
What doesn't surprise me is that IS-set giveaways tend strongly toward geography; most NAQT history or current events tossups about countries will contain a geography clue somewhere near the end of the question. Personally, I think a tossup of the form "FTP an 1815 congress was held in what city, the capital of Austria?" is fine and does nothing to undermine the academic nature of a distribution.
I was pleasantly surprised at how few questions gave away their answers with PC: or SP: clues; the net one here is a tossup on Gone with the Wind that mentions Vivien Leigh at the end.
Net redistribution of clues:
geography +13
myth +1
pop culture +1
religious literature zero
literature zero
sports zero
science -1
visual art -1
music -1
current events -6
history -7
There were an additional five tossups with giveaways that I considered "cute."
Recently the question was asked here: the cute giveaway may be dying at the college level, but how prevalent is it in NAQT's IS sets?
So I took a look through IS-76. (Chosen as the most recent IS set clear for public discussion.)
Like any other IS set, this one contained 360 tossups.
15 are GK, which can't have a cdg (they're already supposed to be multi-disciplinary).
26 are computation, which typically don't do this. (I guess it's possible to write a tossup of the form ...divide 17 by 2 and you'll get--for 10 points--this result that also names a Federico Fellini-directed film... but I feel comfortable asserting that this doesn't happen very often even without having actually checked the math in this set.)
That leaves 319 tossups, of which 21 had cross-disciplinary giveaways (6.58%). Surprisingly, this set actually had fewer of these than the 2009 SCT (30/339, 7.5%).
What doesn't surprise me is that IS-set giveaways tend strongly toward geography; most NAQT history or current events tossups about countries will contain a geography clue somewhere near the end of the question. Personally, I think a tossup of the form "FTP an 1815 congress was held in what city, the capital of Austria?" is fine and does nothing to undermine the academic nature of a distribution.
I was pleasantly surprised at how few questions gave away their answers with PC: or SP: clues; the net one here is a tossup on Gone with the Wind that mentions Vivien Leigh at the end.
Net redistribution of clues:
geography +13
myth +1
pop culture +1
religious literature zero
literature zero
sports zero
science -1
visual art -1
music -1
current events -6
history -7
There were an additional five tossups with giveaways that I considered "cute."