High School Canon: Where Does It Come From? What Is It?...

[cvdwightw]

...Where is it Going?

Two disclaimers:
1. I honestly hope that we can have a discussion that skips around the computational math debate, but I recognize that it's the elephant in the room and so rather than backseat mod and tell people not to post about computational math, I'm simply going to preemptively ask the mods to split the thread if it starts going too far down that direction.
2. Unlike the college game, the high school game has largely evolved with a number of independent circuits only recently (in the modern era) being interconnected through a national mesh, and there are still several isolated circuits that remain unconnected. Therefore, the canon evolved differently in the high school game than in the college game and evolved differently from place to place. This thread is as much about finding out how we are the same and how we are different as finding a single answer to these questions, and no one on any side of a debate should be calling someone's ideas "wrong" without the ability to back that statement up.

A popular concept at the college level is the idea that there is a "canon" of answers; that is, there is a certain group of answers in each subject that tend to come up more often than other answers and are thus worth learning about to score points. I believe this to be even more true at the high school level, where for various reasons a select few answers seem to come up at every single tournament. Thus, it is relevant to consider where the high school canon comes from, how we can define the canon at the high school level, and how (if at all) it should expand.

I want to first list the five main points I want to discuss:

• What is the major purpose of quizbowl at the high school level?
• How much knowledge can we expect a new player to have and how does this influence our answer choices?
• Where do we draw the difficulty line for high school-related material?
• Can we accept the premise that most of the high school distribution should be grounded in the curriculum, and if so, whose curriculum?
• How, if at all, should we expand the high school canon?

I will now elaborate on each of those five points.

• What is the major purpose of quizbowl at the high school level?

Is it to reinforce what students learn in the classroom? Is it to allow intellectually curious students to expand on knowledge gained in the classroom? Is it some combination? Is it a third reason? Without establishing guidelines on what quizbowl is designed to do, we cannot begin to determine the size and shape of the canon.

• How much knowledge can we expect a new player to have and how does this influence our answer choices?

Most tournaments measure their difficulty through conversion statistics, and the idea is that higher conversion means less difficult. How many questions can we expect a new player to answer at his/her first tournament? Do we even consider this when writing high school questions? How much leeway is there between writing to what a new player ought to know and writing to what a more experienced player should know?

The canon has sometimes been referred to as the "new player's best friend," because it is inherently a quizbowl study list. However, everyone has to start somewhere. Is a topic or subject worth writing about if a new player doesn't know it when he starts, but can pick it up through practice and outside studying?

• Where do we draw the difficulty line for high school-related material?

Fact: Over 300 different books (I count 316, but I have never been good at counting) have been referred to on the AP English Literature exam (source). We can reasonably consider this as a list of titles in (mostly) English langauge literature that a group of high school educators considers important (regardless of whether or not the people writing the test are "high school educators" or not, many AP English Lit teachers base their reading selections on what's come up before). Can we justify Alias Grace as a tossup answer choice because it's appeared on three AP English Literature tests this decade, though The Handmaid's Tale has never shown up? Mrs. Warren's Profession has shown up five times in the past 40 years, most recently last year; does that mean it should come up more than Pygmalion (3 times) or Arms and the Man (0 times)? And does anyone think one-mention wonders Bharati Mukherjee (Jasmine, 1999) and Susan Glaspell (Trifles, 2000) are actually askable at the high school level?

Any supposed "teach to the test" class always ends up covering something slightly different - perhaps extra or fewer subjects, perhaps some subjects in more depth - than the same exact class at a different school. If it's not a "teach to the test" class, then figuring out what's actually supposed to be learned in that class is practically impossible. Drawing a line on what is "high school-related" is even more difficult when you consider that the AP and IB classes are intended to approximate college-level material within the confines of a high school class. We can accept the fact that the high school canon should be limited to "high school material," but even outside of quizbowl it is becoming more and more difficult to figure out exactly what that means.

• Can we accept the premise that most of the high school distribution should be grounded in the curriculum, and if so, whose curriculum?

True story: In December 2007, Centennial High School in Maryland hosted a tournament. This tournament contained a tossup on noted obscure work of African literature Gassire's Lute. The inclusion of this tossup was justified because it was part of the school's "Humanities" curriculum.

No two states have the same curriculum, and even if we accept that every school attempts to meet the same "state standards," no two schools teach the curriculum to the same depth in all areas. Should we ban all tossups on calculus concepts because a number of high schools don't offer calculus classes? Should we get rid of geography because many schools eschew it for history, government, and economics? Quizbowl at a national level necessarily means that we cannot advantage one state's "curriculum" over another: if Kansas decides to ban evolution from the curriculum, would we have to stop writing evolutionary biology questions because it's no longer in the Kansas curriculum?

Saying that "quizbowl should be based on the curriculum" is one of those sound bites that looks good when you write it but becomes problematic when you look at the repercussions. I suspect that just about everyone making that claim is trying to say either, "quizbowl should be based on my curriculum" or "quizbowl should be based on everyone's curriculum." Well, that invites the obvious questions: why is your curriculum better than my curriculum, or how many schools need to be included in your definition of "everyone" to make the topic part of the high school quizbowl canon?

I think the assumption that any academic competition must be "based on the curriculum" needs to be seriously re-evaluated: after all, what academic purpose does studying country music (2002 Academic Decathlon) serve?

• How, if at all, should we expand the high school canon?

One complaint about the college game's influence on the high school game is the continued canon expansion. There are players who will hear every good high school question produced in three years by the time they're a senior. This obviously doesn't compare with the college players that have been playing for an indeterminate number of years, but then again, the college canon is a lot larger and harder to master than the high school canon. If we don't allow any canon expansion, then these players will seek challenges at the college game, complain about how easy the high school questions are, and generally become dissatisfied with the high school quizbowl game. If we allow the canon to expand too fast, then we risk leaving behind the not-very-good teams, and they generally become dissatisfied with the high school quizbowl game. Is one of these things worse than the other? Why? Is there some magic rate of canon expansion that would somewhat satisfy both groups? Is there a way to expand the canon that does not involve trickle-down from the college game, and would this alternative be better?

I know I've posed a lot of questions here, but as we all gear up for this year's load of writing, they're things worth thinking about and discussing.

[Rococo A Go Go]

Wow.....this is quite an extensive topic. I'm not sure how to approach all of it, so for now I'll just post the standards Kentucky bases our Governor's Cup competition on:

http://kaac.com/govcup/contentareas.html

[Matt Weiner]

There is no canon.

There are things that are in the triple intersection of "worth knowing," "in the categories that quizbowl asks about," and "answerable by high school quizbowl teams." That's all there is.

It is, of course, true, that with many high school tournaments happening every weekend and all of the above three sets being limited, certain things will very predictably come up in tournament after tournament. It is also true that many things that are answerable by high school quizbowl teams are so because they are taught in most high schools, though the reverse does not follow. Many teams, even non-elite ones, can answer a tossup on William Faulkner, but most people don't read William Faulkner in high school; so we can't say that the so-called high school curriculum determines what is askable, only contributes to it. And of course, there are many things in the high school curriculum that are not in the "categories that quizbowl asks about" set--no answer relating to running laps in gym class is appropriate for quizbowl, even if it's answerable by every team. So, there is a roughly predictable, regular set of answers meeting certain criteria--in that sense there is a canon.

But, in the oft-invoked sense of there being a "canon" of answers that magically are askable because they have been declared to be in said canon or because they have been asked about a lot, I disagree that said "canon" exists or is a useful construct. You can write William Dean Howells tossups until you are blue in the face. You can ask one at every tournament in every region from here until the end of time. But the fact is, very few people in high school quizbowl know who William Dean Howells is. The answer is too hard (empirically, because it will never be answered except by the occasional American realism buff or by the small fraction of teams which study old packets) and thus it shouldn't be a tossup answer, no matter how "canonical" it is.

Thus, the answer to: "are there answers which, just by being labeled as canonical or asked a lot, are elevated from non-askable to askable?" is "no, there are no such answers." And since that is what people ordinarily refer to when invoking "the canon," there is no canon.

[theMoMA]

I generally make the assumption that askable things for high schoolers are things that meet the criteria of being academically rigorous (I will label this as "academically important" for the rest of the discourse), posing no significant problems by nature, and meeting some criteria of answerability. I think it's safe to classify anything that fits those three categories is "canonical" (note when I say "canonical" here, the definition includes a difficulty standard and thus should be taken to mean "canonical for a certain level of play [i.e. high school in this case];" one could certainly use the term "canonical" to describe many things, including all possible answers, all possible answers for a certain level, or all already-used answers at a certain level/all levels; please note the rigorous definition that I'm employing).

It's misguided to assume that the canon is like a shelf of books representing all past answers, and that one need simply choose between one or another when writing a question. While it's true that this may define the canon-to-this-point understanding of the canon, it's certainly not the ultimate roster of all possible canonical things (i.e. how I am defining "canon"). And that means it's not that useful for a discourse on how we're to write in the future. The canon most useful for that is the subset of all things that meet the criteria of importance, ability to be the answer to a quizbowl question, and difficulty. Defining those three concepts is thus really important, because their definitions mark the boundaries of the canon.

The first two are somewhat obvious in most cases. We wouldn't ask a literature tossup on Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, or write a tossup on an answer that is by nature very transparent, and while "knowledge of what Fischer diagrams of various sugars look like" is certainly important and may be difficulty-appropriate, it's not something that is within the bounds of quizbowl as a game. While there are certain things on the border of "academically important" and "not that" or "impossible to ask about by nature of the answer" and "not that," it's pretty clear when something is even borderline, and editors can limit borderline cases if they arise with undesired frequency. I'm not so troubled with defining those things, since they've got pretty clear smell tests, and playing quizbowl for a while will give anyone a practical definition. And those just starting to play don't exactly need a perfect understanding of the outer limits of knowledge tested in the game, so it'd cost more time than it's worth to define them.

What I think leads people astray about the canon is that they confuse "things that fail the difficulty standard" with "things that fail the importance standard." Susan Glaspell and Alias Grace are academically important by any standard of quizbowl. They are not within a reasonable difficulty standard for high school quizbowl, and some people attach the term "importance" (i.e. Alias Grace is less important than The Handmaid's Tale) to failing this standard. That leads to the conflicting (and seemingly logical) conclusions that Alias Grace is both unimportant and important, and thus that the canon is hard (impossible, possibly) to define. It's not. Simply pick a conversion percentage for your field for the markers of tossup performance, first bonus part performance, second bonus part performance, and third bonus part performance; size up the potential answer in the particular slot to the best of your ability; and conclude it outside the canon (or possibly, outside the canon of tossup answers but acceptable for the canon of third bonus part answers, etc) if it fails the difficulty test.

This gets rid of all of the confusion about AP tests and curriculum. The reason that such confusion exists is because the existence of a topic on an AP test or in official curriculum usually is sufficient to conclude that the answer is academically important, which people tend not to separate from actual difficulty. We have to realize that academic importance has nothing to do with difficulty; both Jesus Christ and Torsten Steelglove are academically important, and obviously there are about six billion people who know of the former and maybe six thousand who know of the latter. So let's just keep in mind that if someone says "that bonus part was impossible," an incorrect response is "but that play was on the AP English test in 1997" or "that person is in Maryland's state-mandated curriculum." That's irrelevant! It merely proves that the answer is academically important, not difficulty-appropriate.

[theMoMA]

What I just said is logically equivalent to Matt's premise, as well.

[at your pleasure]

While I disagree with Matt in that I do think there's a high school canon(in the sense of "things that we can all agree a intelligent, curious high schooler should have heard of"), I think he alludes to something very, very important-how often something gets asked about should be much less important for high school quizbowl than college quizbowl. First of all, unlike college quizbowl, where people may play for 6 or 8 years(or even longer; just look at Andrew Yaphe), the vast majority of people play high school quizbowl for at most four years. This means that people have much less time to learn about what's asked about a lot. Furthermore, the weak high schoolers for whom "canon redshift" is a problemare less likely to read many packets on their own time(which considerably accelerates "quizbowl osmosis"). Now some of this is that people just don't know about the archives, but increased knowledge of the archives will only go so far.
Now if we don't want to rely on what's asked about a lot or what's in the curriculum to determine what's askable in high school quizbowl, what can we do? Well, we can take individual subject areas that quizbowl cares about and ask "what might a layman who wishes to learn about a paticular topic independently probably encounter?". If we apply this to a topic like literature or a subset therof, we'd look at how often something is discussed in "general overviews of X subset of literature", how often the work is cited as important by other writers or critics, and other measures of importance. Althogh this seems like a lot of work, many of the things that our generic layman would encounter are common sense. For instance, it's pretty clear to someone who does even cursory research on African literature that a high schooler who decides to learn about african literature will more likely encounter Things Fall Apart than Gassire's Lute. Canon expansion here can simply be asking more about things that are rarely asked about but widely encountered.

[cvdwightw]

Seeing as I started the thread, I might as well reply with my thoughts.

• What is the major purpose of quizbowl at the high school level?

Quizbowl is, first and foremost, an activity in which people who have knowledge of facts compete to find out who knows the most facts. That's all it is, at any level, with any format, etc. Sometimes the set of facts that one team knows overlaps the packet set better than the set of facts a different team knows; that's why different teams end up winning different tournaments with different questions. To that end, we can't really have a bunch of ridiculous questions that no one will answer or a bunch of really easy questions that devolve into buzzer races - these do not show who knows the most facts. Pyramidal questions on relatively easy tossup answers and tiered-difficulty bonuses do. To that end, I agree with Doug - the bottom line for answer selection should be "What should an intelligent, intellectually curious high schooler know about?" Not what he/she does know, but what he should know. As the levels get higher and the competition gets tougher, it is reasonable to expect that this set of "intelligent, intellectually curious high schoolers" should know more.

• How much knowledge can we expect a new player to have and how does this influence our answer choices?

I think the canon for local events - insofar as, as Matt and Andrew say, there is a canon - needs to be grounded in the high school curriculum, because that is the least common denominator for what we can expect students in a state to "should know." However, it necessarily needs to move outside of that restriction, not least because every state has different standards. Every new player comes in with a completely different background and knowledge base, so it's not right to say that Student A's Bible study or Student B's music lessons are somehow less important because they weren't learned in class. To that end, as Bruce Arthur is fond of saying, the "canon" is a new player's best friend. We can't define what a new player will know coming in, but we can define what an experienced player should know when leaving the game. Insofar as a canon exists, that is what we should try to emulate.

• Where do we draw the difficulty line for high school-related material?

I agree completely with Andrew that for a "canon" to exist at the high school level, each component must satisfy the criteria of academic importance, lack of significant problems, and answerability. I think, then, that the canon must be defined iteratively - we write some questions, we see whether and when they were answered, we conclude whether the answers are canonical or not, we write questions for the next event/year. The canon, then, cannot exist in the sense of the college canon ("once something gets in the canon, it stays in the canon until people decide to stop writing about it"); it must always be defined in terms of what the last group knew. For most of us, we have only our local circuits to use as a gauge of what is known and what is not. If we're just writing for a local or state tournament, that's probably fine. If we're writing a nationally mirrored set, then we have to be really careful and use our best judgment to estimate what percentile team in our region matches with the 50th percentile team nationwide.

• Can we accept the premise that most of the high school distribution should be grounded in the curriculum, and if so, whose curriculum?

I think I've answered this above, and Andrew's certainly answered it better than me, so I'll reiterate what he's saying. The fact that something is part of a curriculum makes it (usually) pass the academic importance test, and it should be intuitively obvious whether or not it has significant problems. Thus, the only criterion it must pass is the difficulty criterion.

"It's in the curriculum" is not a subset of "it's in the canon." As an example, EDIT: A lot of rooms at HSNCT missed the "disproportionation reaction" tossup. [EDIT: I'll put exact conversion stats back in if NAQT's fine with that being released] Now, I'll assume that a bunch of the non-converts were good teams who answered "redox," got prompted, and blanked on what was wanted, but still, that's an appreciable percentage of teams that did not know the definition of a disproportionation reaction. I'm about 80% sure that this is a topic covered in regular chemistry, and I'm 100% sure that it was covered in either my regular or AP Chemistry class; I'm also pretty sure that the regular chemistry curriculum is essentially the same nationwide. I think it's safe to conclude that disproportionation is "in the curriculum" but not "in the canon," using our definition of the canon, and that we should send disproportionation to the middle-bonus-part-at-HSNCT difficulty level, if not third-bonus-part-at-HSNCT difficulty level.

• How, if at all, should we expand the high school canon?

I think that this is where Matt Weiner's definition of "There is no canon" and some of the high school coaches' complaints about the influence of the college game come in. Several principles that apply at the college level do not apply at the high school level, and the trickle-down effect is one of them (it's possible that the very concept of a canon is another, but I prefer to think of it as that the canon as it functions in the college game is what does not fit, not the idea that a canon exists). If anything, we need to start a canon contraction - get rid of questions that are uniformly converted at low rates compared to the norm for their subject (possibly adjusting for location), see if we can replace them with easier answer choices, and bump the offending topics up the difficulty ladder.

[Stained Diviner]

Thanks for starting this thread. This is interesting. I think that, however, the topic is so wide that we might be getting some answers that are a bit simplistic.

The purpose Dwight just gave for quizbowl may work well as the purpose for a particular tournament, but any defined purpose of this activity has to include the fact that learning is the real purpose. You should win or lose a match based on whether you know more or less than your opponent, and usually (though certainly not always) that's what happens. However, it is probably more important that you should hear some interesting information in some of the questions or have a voice in your head telling you that you need to go learn some more ________.

Additionally, when discussing the purpose, an interesting question is whether it has generally the same purpose as collegiate quizbowl, just at a different difficulty level, or whether there is a fundamental difference. The distinction may be most obvious in debates over the roles that Geography and Current Events play in quizbowl. Even though those are academic subjects, quizbowl questions in those topics tend to be less academic than questions in some other categories, which is why they are in some ways on a downhill slope. However, is it possible that the purpose of collegiate quizbowl is more academic than high school quizbowl and that the purpose of high school quizbowl is more along the lines of cultural literacy/knowledgeable citizenship? If so, than geography and current events would serve the purpose of high school quizbowl better than collegiate quizbowl. To draw an even finer distinction, might there be a difference in purpose between elite quizbowl and local quizbowl?

As to the canon, there is a historical progression. Quizbowl cannot start out with a well-defined canon. Collegiate quizbowl built one up over several years thanks to ACF, the Stanford Archive, and internal discussions of which tournaments served as good models. High school quizbowl has a different history, since it is more difficult to build a canon at the local level, there has been less consensus as to whether a canon should exist, and until very recently there were very few packets available to everybody. High school is also different in that there are a lot more casual teams and that incoming high school students don't know very much, so anything considered regular difficulty has to have a lot of common knowledge in it, even if most of that common knowledge shows up in tossup giveaways and one part per bonus. We are now seeing the development of a canon among good teams--stuff that good quizbowlers around the country know but that the vast majority of intelligent non-quizbowlers do not know--but that canon will always be a bit fuzzier than the college canon, and there will always be a lot of students/teams who don't know it.

I don't think it makes sense to expand the high school canon too much, though as the good teams get better it makes sense to make leadins tougher, even if that means lengthening questions a little bit, and to expand the expectations for hard bonus parts. I would hope that five years from now it would be more difficult to 30 a bonus but equally difficult to 10 a bonus as compared to now, since there are better resources available to students who want to get better but newbies will be newbies.

I also think the role of the canon and the curriculum varies from subject to subject. In science and history, it is a reasonable expectation that almost all tossup answers and most bonus answers will be concepts/people/events that students could look up in their textbooks assuming they are far enough along an academic curriculum. Textbooks generally lack depth, so they aren't good at providing leadins or helping students sweep lots of bonuses, but they cover the basics that average teams should know. In literature, fine arts, and other categories, there generally are no textbooks that high school students use in their classes, so the standard has to be more along the lines of is the answer extremely well known within the discipline. I agree with what is said above that there has to be some trial and error in this regard. (For example, I always thought that Strindberg was well within the high school canon, but after hearing what happened with a Strindberg tossup at the college level I should adjust that belief.)

[Important Bird Area]

As an example, EDIT: A lot of rooms at HSNCT missed the "disproportionation reaction" tossup. [EDIT: I'll put exact conversion stats back in if NAQT's fine with that being released]

We're fine with releasing these:

disproportionation reaction: 64 rooms, zero powers, 4 tens, 25 negs. (I assume almost all of the negs were: redox, prompt, blank.)

That's enough for me to conclude: needs to be a third bonus part at HSNCT level.

[Down and out in Quintana Roo]

As an example, EDIT: A lot of rooms at HSNCT missed the "disproportionation reaction" tossup. [EDIT: I'll put exact conversion stats back in if NAQT's fine with that being released]

We're fine with releasing these:

disproportionation reaction: 64 rooms, zero powers, 4 tens, 25 negs. (I assume almost all of the negs were: redox, prompt, blank.)

That's enough for me to conclude: needs to be a third bonus part at HSNCT level.

Wow, did any other tossup have a negative average in points earned? Or at least, a negative number so far below 0?

[Important Bird Area]

• How, if at all, should we expand the high school canon?

I think that this is where Matt Weiner's definition of "There is no canon" and some of the high school coaches' complaints about the influence of the college game come in. Several principles that apply at the college level do not apply at the high school level, and the trickle-down effect is one of them (it's possible that the very concept of a canon is another, but I prefer to think of it as that the canon as it functions in the college game is what does not fit, not the idea that a canon exists). If anything, we need to start a canon contraction - get rid of questions that are uniformly converted at low rates compared to the norm for their subject (possibly adjusting for location), see if we can replace them with easier answer choices, and bump the offending topics up the difficulty ladder.

Strongly agree with this.

I believe that there is a high school canon, and furthermore that's it's not a closed space- I think there's a spectrum of difficulty/canon expansion from the novice high school tournament all the way up to Westbrook-experimental. This is as it should be, because the players who play high school nationals will, in a year or two, be playing ACF Fall and/or DII ICT.

Agreed, however, that the trickle-down effect doesn't happen in high school tournaments (there are probably limited exceptions for the third parts of nationals bonuses). Primary reasons: No one plays more than four years of high school quizbowl, which is an effective cap on the amount we can expect high school players to learn (above and beyond that high school curricula are much narrower than college ones). Furthermore: high schoolers who want to play very difficult tournaments have the option to (and are increasingly) playing college events. So we'll never see a a group of experimental/vanity/single-subject events for high schoolers the way Gaddis and the Experiment and the various Monstrosities exist for college play- because events much harder than HSNCT or PACE NSC will attract college players, be declared open-eligibility, and merge into the college canon.

[Important Bird Area]

Wow, did any other tossup have a negative average in points earned? Or at least, a negative number so far below 0?

Headed off topic, but here's the rest of the bottom end of the scoreboard (yes, there were a couple more tossups with net points destroyed):

Answer line (15/10/-5) (rooms)

(-3, -2) 0/0/1 (4 rooms)
Pure Pwnage 0/1/7 (13 rooms)

[Down and out in Quintana Roo]

Wow, did any other tossup have a negative average in points earned? Or at least, a negative number so far below 0?

Headed off topic, but here's the rest of the bottom end of the scoreboard (yes, there were a couple more tossups with net points destroyed):

Answer line (15/10/-5) (rooms)

(-3, -2) 0/0/1 (4 rooms)
Pure Pwnage 0/1/7 (13 rooms)

Math calc and trash. There're a lot of people who aren't going to be surprised by that.

Anyway, not to get the thread off track again...

I don't think it makes sense to expand the high school canon too much, though as the good teams get better it makes sense to make leadins tougher, even if that means lengthening questions a little bit, and to expand the expectations for hard bonus parts. I would hope that five years from now it would be more difficult to 30 a bonus but equally difficult to 10 a bonus as compared to now, since there are better resources available to students who want to get better but newbies will be newbies.

I love this response from David. I couldn't agree more with just about everything he says here especially. Believe me i don't want to see the same questions and answers just recycled over and over through the years, but like David said i definitely do not want to see answers like George Washington, Napoleon, electron, and Mark Twain ever ever taken out of the canon. Can we expand to harder things in the "third part" of bonus questions? Absolutely. I anticipate this (well, it's already happening) and i welcome it. But the "base" answers HAVE to stay, including those for the "easy" bonus parts.

[at your pleasure]

Additionally, when discussing the purpose, an interesting question is whether it has generally the same purpose as collegiate quizbowl, just at a different difficulty level, or whether there is a fundamental difference.

Interesting question, David, and I think it really goes to the heart of the conflict between circuit quizbowl (usually good) and state format quizbowl(bad in most states). If you focus on the "good citizenship/cultural literacy" model, that provides very little reason to expand the canon or even go beyond a very low baseline. If you focus on the "promote knowledge of interesting academic subjects and compete to demonstrate said knowledge" model, difficulty can and should be whatever the field will bear.

Dr. Bunsen Honeydew said:
I love this response from David. I couldn't agree more with just about everything he says here especially. Believe me i don't want to see the same questions and answers just recycled over and over through the years, but like David said i definitely do not want to see answers like George Washington, Napoleon, electron, and Mark Twain ever ever taken out of the canon.

Fun fact: There was a George Washington tossup at ACF nationals. Granted, the giveaway was "Identify this target of the Conway Cabal, who went on to name such figures as Henry Knox and Alexander Hamilton to his cabinet", but the answer line was George Washington. In a more relevant vein, while I agree that easy answers are useful(and can be tailored to any difficulty, as the above shows), the proportion should vary at different levels. A novice tournament should consist almost entirely of easy answers, but a national championship can afford to emphasize more difficult things over easier things thanks to the high caliber of its target audience.

[Important Bird Area]

Math calc and trash. There're a lot of people who aren't going to be surprised by that

See my comments in the other thread, to the effect that math calc is a pattern and trash less so.

Top 15 least-answered HSNCT tossups:

(-3, -2)
disproportionation reaction
Tom Foley
Pure Pwnage
Progressive Conservative Party of Canada
Eclogues
56 ways
80 centimeters
90
Keyboard Cat
Federico Garcia Lorca
hash table
William Dean Howells
6
The Remains of the Day

[The King's Flight to the Scots]

Federico Garcia Lorca

Wait, really? Wow, that's surprising.

[Not That Kind of Christian!!]

Federico Garcia Lorca
hash table

These are the only ones that surprise me. On the whole, the other answers (excluding mathcalc, a separate issue altogether) are either bizarre trash answer choices or academic choices that I wouldn't normally ascribe to the high school knowledge base.

[jonah]

Federico Garcia Lorca
hash table

These are the only ones that surprise me. On the whole, the other answers (excluding mathcalc, a separate issue altogether) are either bizarre trash answer choices or academic choices that I wouldn't normally ascribe to the high school knowledge base.

Hash table doesn't surprise me. In general, I get the impression that computer science sees very poor conversion at high school levels. Jeff, if you can provide conversion results for other computer science questions of late, I'd be interested to see if my impression is reflected in your data.

[Alejandro]

Federico Garcia Lorca
hash table

These are the only ones that surprise me. On the whole, the other answers (excluding mathcalc, a separate issue altogether) are either bizarre trash answer choices or academic choices that I wouldn't normally ascribe to the high school knowledge base.

Hash table doesn't surprise me. In general, I get the impression that computer science sees very poor conversion at high school levels. Jeff, if you can provide conversion results for other computer science questions of late, I'd be interested to see if my impression is reflected in your data.

I agree with Jonah. Conversion rates should be even worse now that the AP Computer Science AB test has been discontinued, where many of the interesting high-school-appropriate CS topics are.

[Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN)]

Yeah, I don't think my high school even offered a programming class.

[Mike Bentley]

I'd also be mildly interested in seeing the CS conversion rates, although I don't remember all too many CS questions at the HSNCT itself.

[Important Bird Area]

Federico Garcia Lorca
hash table

These are the only ones that surprise me.

Both of these had pretty small sample size (only 7 rooms heard them). But still, going dead in six out of seven rooms is less than good.

[Important Bird Area]

Hash table doesn't surprise me. In general, I get the impression that computer science sees very poor conversion at high school levels. Jeff, if you can provide conversion results for other computer science questions of late, I'd be interested to see if my impression is reflected in your data.

2009 HSNCT: 142 rooms, 7/109/18 for 81.7% conversion. (That's a very good conversion rate.)

IS #85: 33 rooms, 0/19/3 for 57.6% conversion. (That's pretty bad.)

[Important Bird Area]

Since people seem to like this sort of thing:

Here's the list of non-computational tossups that were read to at least 60 rooms (that is: in the first 20 on Saturday) and were converted less than 40% of the time:

disproportionation reaction
Progressive Conservative Party of Canada
---10% conversion---
William Dean Howells
The Remains of the Day
---20% conversion---
Charles Sanders Peirce
Kirsten Gillibrand
E. T. A. Hoffmann
Agustin Iturbide
---25% conversion---
Times Like These
Norma
Good-bye, Mr. Chips
Eos
Xenophon
The Education of Henry Adams
wavefunction collapse
---30% conversion---
Ptah
Juliette Gordon Low
Atreus
fark.com
Students for a Democratic Society
lattice energy
The Lusiads
Rick Blaine
Benjamin Banneker
culture
Vespasian
Vilfredo Pareto
replicants
Loving v. Virginia
Milan Kundera
Nathanael West
baryons
counterexamples
---40% conversion---

[Important Bird Area]

OK, I'll drag this back from conversion-stats-o-rama with a theory post.

I don't think the high school and college canons are separate. Maybe they were separate years ago, but there are too many people writing for both levels, and increasingly too many hs players playing college events, to keep them separate.

In fact, I think the trend of hs players playing college tournaments, and the recent discussion of "how to appeal to brand-new college teams that get discouraged by ACF Fall" are two sides of the same coin: that is, there's an ill-defined gray area between regular-difficulty high school sets and regular-difficulty college sets. Officially, NAQT DII SCT is one point easier on our difficulty scale than HSNCT; I have no way of actually evaluating the accuracy of that. Moreover: how do those two tournaments compare to other events in the same area: PACE NSC, EFT, ACF Fall? There's no community consensus about this stuff, as the big thread the other day about NSC/HSNCT difficulty shows.

What all of that means: high school and college events don't have separate canons. There's one big canon, it's a single spectrum from high school novice events all the way up to the various post-nationals and experimental/vanity events.

It starts from a certain baseline, what we can expect high school novice players to know. That baseline is higher for novice college players (because they've had four more years of education).

I don't think that "cultural literacy" and "knowledge competition" models of quizbowl are necessarily in conflict at all, either. The first establishes that baseline to get new people into the game, while the second is inherent in the basic structure of what we recognize as good quizbowl (pyramidal tossups and easy/medium/hard bonus parts).

[at your pleasure]

bt_green_warbler wrote:
don't think that "cultural literacy" and "knowledge competition" models of quizbowl are necessarily in conflict at all, either. The first establishes that baseline to get new people into the game, while the second is inherent in the basic structure of what we recognize as good quizbowl (pyramidal tossups and easy/medium/hard bonus parts).

They don't in the context of good quizbowl; the problem comes when you have "cultural literacy" considerations dictating limits the answer space at all events, in which case the canon is becomes unsustainably small. There's also the question of where we set the cultural literacy bar. Also, I'd like to second the suprise at how poorly Garcia Lorca was converted at HSNCT.

[master15625]

Well, Garcia Lorca came near the end of a packet if I am not mistaken. Usually if teams hear the questions near the end of a packet means that a lot of questions have been powered, or teams were bad that they didn't get tossups. I have a feeling that the teams were bad that they didn't get the previous tossups.

I know that many good teams probably would've answered Garcia Lorca if not powered that question if it came near the beginning of a packet.

[Tanay]

Yeah, I'm definitely surprised by some of these. Apparently, sports difficulty is not a problem at all, as no sports questions are on this list. Additionally, I thought for sure that David Cameron (under current events) would be on this list of low conversions. Cameron (the British opposition leader in Parliament) is substantially more difficult than someone like Kirsten Gillibrand, who was in the news for quite a while. It seems as though Cameron stood out as substantially harder than the other leaders asked (Berlusconi, Medvedev, Zardari, etc). So I think it's pretty cool that he was converted more than 40%.

Speaking of which, can we see the stat line for David Cameron? It makes me happy inside to know that there are other British parliament fanatics...

Can we also see the stat line for Eurovision? I was surprised that it showed up, and even more so that people in the States watch it. My only exposure to Eurovision was in India...

I agree with Neil on the Garcia Lorca issue. This is pretty surprising.

[Important Bird Area]

Well, Garcia Lorca came near the end of a packet if I am not mistaken. Usually if teams hear the questions near the end of a packet means that a lot of questions have been powered, or teams were bad that they didn't get tossups. I have a feeling that the teams were bad that they didn't get the previous tossups.

It was the next-to-last tossup. This is an interesting hypothesis that is kind of hard to test right now. (The filter on our conversion data is "how many rooms heard this?" which makes it hard to tell this tossup #23 kind of stuff from tossups read in only a handful of rooms in the playoffs. The two situations should be expected to have very different conversion patterns, which might explain some of the surprising stuff going on here.) I've asked R. for an upgrade, but in the meantime there's no way to do this without cross-reference round placement for each tossup by hand; so don't expect it anytime soon.

Speaking of which, can we see the stat line for David Cameron?

6/26/8 in 64 rooms, so exactly 50%. (Which is still less than we would like, but obviously better than some of the other answer lines in this thread.)

Can we also see the stat line for Eurovision?

19/24/4 in 60 rooms, 71.7% conversion. This one seems to have been too easy to power.