The Quizbowl Resource Center

Thanks to everyone who played ACF Fall 2014- we'd love to hear your comments on the set here.

There's a long list of people who helped make this tournament happen. First and foremost were our editors: Jordan Brownstein, Jacob Reed, Max Schindler, Richard Yu, and Ben Zhang. These guys wrote good questions and were very responsive throughout the process. Here is what each of them edited:

Jordan worked on European & World History; also wrote/edited some Literature
Jacob worked on all Fine Arts, Geograph & Trash.
Richard worked on Euro Lit, World Lit, Religion, Philosophy & Social Science.
Max worked on American Lit, Brit Lit, Physics, Other Science & the "extra science" questions.
Ben worked on American History, Biology, Chemistry & Mythology.

We'd also like to thank Matt Bollinger, Rob Carson, Andrew Hart & John Lawrence for giving a lot of feedback that helped polish the set. Rob especially helped a lot as we worked to put final touches. Finally, big thanks to all of the hosts - you helped us reach a lot of teams this year!

The stats to all sites can be accessed through this page - please give hosts some time to post complete stats.

There are a few corrections we'd like to make before uploading the set. We will have it all up by Tuesday night. Until then, feel free to discuss the set in general. We would love to hear any and all feedback.

EDIT (11 Nov): You can download a copy of the set from this link. We will upload it to the tournament database shortly.

I'd like to thank G&G Kandlikar for being a great head-editing team, really making it a lot of fun to put this tournament together (same goes to Ben, Jordan, Max, and Richard). And definitely big thanks to Rob and John especially for some very helpful comments/corrections in my categories, at least.

This might be one of the corrections you were talking about above, but there was apparently a problem with the bonus part on Argentina (I think the first part was Juan Peron). Unfortunately I don't remember which packet this was in.

a bird wrote:This might be one of the corrections you were talking about above, but there was apparently a problem with the bonus part on Argentina (I think the first part was Juan Peron). Unfortunately I don't remember which packet this was in.

Yeah, that was a really egregious error that we should have caught. Sorry about that.

I might have more to say later, but a few quick notes:

1. I'm thrilled you guys kept my cinematography bonus. I was proud of that one.

2. Answering "The King" should be acceptable for "the dauphin" in the Huck Finn bonus, because, like, he's totally called that.

3. I might have misheard this one, but I think the bonus part on lettuce in the Egyptian myth bonus referred to it as a fruit.

Habitat_Against_Humanity wrote:3. I might have misheard this one, but I think the bonus part on lettuce in the Egyptian myth bonus referred to it as a fruit.

The exact wording is:

Colonel By A + Ottawa A, bonus 4 wrote: [10] After Set ate some of this food in which had Horus had ejaculated, Horus was able to call his semen from within Set and thus prove his superiority over him.

First off, I'll echo the sentiments above with respect to the set overall. Thank you so much to the editors for your hard work, it was a ball to play. (We were also absolutely elated and honored to make the set, possibly Lawrence's first time ever, so that was really cool.) There were just a couple of anomalies that I wanted to bring up.

I found the fact that we heard three tossups on colors, two on "red" and one on "blue," pretty gimmicky. They were from different angles, which was interesting, but especially tossing up the same color twice seemed like an odd choice.

I'll let the music mafia duke it out, but the fact that "piano concerto" was both a tossup and a bonus part felt a little weird, especially when the third part to said bonus was "piano trio."

Also, personally, I was a little sad that we didn't hear more Russian lit–-I don't think there was a single tossup on it, and there was maybe one bonus solely dedicated to it (i.e., without common-links).

The trash also seemed to skew really visually, in terms of movies/TV/video games. Maybe there was a lot of film in for miscellaneous fine art that I'm incorrectly remembering as trash? There was that Linkin Park bonus, and I suppose I didn't hear my own musical trash tossup played until a post-tournament scrimmage, but I don't think I heard anybody else's musical trash either.

I had a longer post about music (and in general the harder qs) typed up before I lost it to internet issues.

Anyway, I think the specific music TUs that were pointed out as too hard are not so bad - I had some folks at the Berkeley mirror buzz in on early-to-late middle clues on some of the tossups (the cello and Ravel come to mind). In general there were only a few music TUs which were completely unanswered.

I do agree on the fact that there were a few hard tossups in general. These were basically "the hardest questions in their category" that I deemed weren't too egregious for Fall. There shouldn't have been more than 4-5 TUs like this throughout the tournament. Letting the occasional harder question slip through is something I did for the few MUTs I worked on, and I've never had major negative feedback about it. If you think we did a poor job of controlling the presence of harder questions, we'd like to hear where we went wrong.

Aaron's Rod wrote: The trash also seemed to skew really visually, in terms of movies/TV/video games. Maybe there was a lot of film in for miscellaneous fine art that I'm incorrectly remembering as trash? There was that Linkin Park bonus, and I suppose I didn't hear my own musical trash tossup played until a post-tournament scrimmage, but I don't think I heard anybody else's musical trash either.

There was also a music bonus about organ parts in rock songs. I enjoyed that bonus on several levels. I'm not sure about the overall trend, but I agree that there wasn't an abundance of audio trash.

I don't know if it was me, but this tournament seemed to have a lot more Graeco-Roman myth and film questions than usual. Were those subdistributions increased?

Aaron's Rod wrote: I found the fact that we heard three tossups on colors, two on "red" and one on "blue," pretty gimmicky. They were from different angles, which was interesting, but especially tossing up the same color twice seemed like an odd choice.

Different people worked on the questions - Max on the lit "Red", Jacob on the fashion "red", Jacob on the painting "blue", Ben on the science "green." I also believe all of these were centrally written questions and showed some creativeness. It's easier to write questions like these to incorporate interesting content that is too difficult to be asked about on its own - a Louboutin TU would basically have a conversion of between 2 and 5% if I were to bet on it, but I think the "red" did a good job of having a pyramidal gradation.

Aaron's Rod wrote: Also, personally, I was a little sad that we didn't hear more Russian lit–-I don't think there was a single tossup on it, and there was maybe one bonus solely dedicated to it (i.e., without common-links).

There were a few TUs and bonuses on Russian lit around - it's possible that the vagaries of packet-selection at your site meant you didn't get to hear much. We'll post the set in the next 48 hours, so you can check then.

Aaron's Rod wrote: The trash also seemed to skew really visually, in terms of movies/TV/video games. Maybe there was a lot of film in for miscellaneous fine art that I'm incorrectly remembering as trash? There was that Linkin Park bonus, and I suppose I didn't hear my own musical trash tossup played until a post-tournament scrimmage, but I don't think I heard anybody else's musical trash either.

There was a TU on Eminem, a TU on Weird Al, a bonus on organ in music (it had The Beatles, the doors and something else), the bonus on Linkin Park, and bonus on Maroon 5. We also had food, fashion, and a couple of current events get relegated to the "trash" distribution so we didn't have 16/16 trash in the set - and there were some packets which only had 1 trash qusetion (to make way for more RMP/Fine Arts etc.) So that might also be contributing to the perception.

Corner Grocery Store wrote:I don't know if it was me, but this tournament seemed to have a lot more Graeco-Roman myth and film questions than usual. Were those subdistributions increased?

7/7 of the 15/13 myth in the set is non-Greco Roman I think. Some of these might be "common links with some G/R clues" though. Don't think this is too egregious. I think one of things contributing to the perception is that we had some Lit questions on classics that took a Myth-y feel. Like the TU on Dido, Gilgamesh, Ramayana, etc. In a couple of these packets we decided to cut a spot devoted to myth for more fine arts, since there was already some myth-y lit.

We didn't make any conscious effort to increase film or movies. I think in one case I ended up taking a Trash TU and inadvertantly placing it in the "Other Arts" row of our packetizing grid. In many cases, it was just the vagaries of submission.

EDIT: clarifying.

With the exception of the "bridge" tossup that had cantilever in the first line and mentioned something like going over a body of water, I really thought this was a great set. The unique approaches to history tossups (the WWII tossup solely on US actions before the war, USA and CSA) were especially appreciated.

I liked this set very much (my first ever ACF Fall!), and almost all the questions were enjoyable. I regret not having played prior editions of ACF Fall.

In addition to certain tossups that were out of place because they were too hard, there were some other questions that were on the far other end of the difficulty spectrum. At the site I attended, the main complaints were about the tossups on the Magic Flute and bridges, and the bonus on Mario Kart. The Magic Flute tossup mentioned the high Fs in the first clue, something that is one of the more well known parts of the opera. The bridges tossup said it was cantilevered over rivers in the first clue.

Again to repeat others, thank you very much to all the editors and writers.

Strange Fascination wrote: the "bridge" tossup that had cantilever in the first line and mentioned something like going over a body of water

This one's on me - I had made a note to myself to come back to the TU at some point and provide Jacob some pointers on how it could be enhanced, but it looks like I lost that note and never looked at the question again. Sorry about that.

Gautam wrote:

Strange Fascination wrote: the "bridge" tossup that had cantilever in the first line and mentioned something like going over a body of water

This one's on me - I had made a note to myself to come back to the TU at some point and provide Jacob some pointers on how it could be enhanced, but it looks like I lost that note and never looked at the question again. Sorry about that.

I was wondering about the difficulty of that clue (and should have come back to this question), but I will note that this is the first complaint I've heard about it.

I mentioned this to Max, but in the bonus on Pynchon in the Ohio State Distance/Louisville A et al packet I believe Maxine's last name is Tarnow, not Tornow. Also, it has Bleeding Edge misspelled as Bleeding Age in the last part of the bonus. To show what I mean:

[10] This most recent novel by the author of Gravity's Rainbow follows Maxine Tornow's investigations of Gabriel Ice's shady business dealings in the run-up to the 9/11 attacks.
ANSWER: Bleeding Edge
[10] Gravity's Rainbow and Bleeding Age are novels by this reclusive American novelist, who also penned The Crying of Lot 49.
ANSWER: Thomas Pynchon [or Thomas Ruggles Pynchon]

Also, the Marx tossup just cuts out into a run-on sentence in the second-to-last line before for 10 points.

In one work, he argued that the rate of profit tends to fall as production tends to advance, which causes.

One point that Virginia (former Valencia, now UCF) and I were discussing was the choice of "In the Penal Colony" as a TU answerline. In context, the two of us were reading ACF Fall 2013 packets last week, and the Northmont pack has the following bonus, where clearly "In the Penal Colony" is the 30-point part:

2. A prisoner initially sentenced to death for failing to salute the Commandant’s door on an hourly basis is set free in this short story. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this short story in which an officer dies while using a torture machine to carve the words “Be Just” on his body.
ANSWER: “In the Penal Colony”
[10] This Czech author of “In the Penal Colony” wrote a novel in which the land surveyor K. is summoned to meet Klamm, but never succeeds. That unfinished novel is The Castle.
ANSWER: Franz Kafka
[10] Kafka is best known for this novel in which Gregor Samsa awakens to find that he has been transformed into an insect, and later dies when his father throws an apple at him.
ANSWER: The Metamorphosis

I'm aware of canon expansion and the interest to challenge/educate, but it seemed odd to me that what was one-year ago the "hard" part of an ACF Fall 2013 bonus is now an ACF Fall 2014 TU answerline (in lieu of other, maybe more accessible Kafka works at this level).

On the topic of colors, it is noted that while "red" was a TU answer twice, the Cincinnati Reds were also a TU answer (in the same pack as one of the two "red" answers, IIRC). Not a criticism, just an observation.

I'd have to look at the questions once they're posted, but it seemed there was some issue with the Cupid/Eros interchangeability at our site.

And kudos to whoever was responsible for choosing "salad" as a TU answer. That probably earned the unofficial distinction of being the most talked about question of the day.

Overall, I felt the set seemed OK to me, and am curious to check out the rounds we didn't play. Also thanks to Borglum for letting us borrow some buzzers at the last minute --- we'll get them back to you in time for Delta Burke.

Finally, special congrats to UCF A (solid performance, and should make waves at ICT next spring), and to Dorman & Chattahoochee.

It should be noted that hard part is made slightly harder because it doesn't give you Kafka as the author of In the Penal Colony, so the tossup would be easier because of that. I'd agree it's on the fringe side of hard/acceptable for Fall.

I've moved the music discussion into its own thread.

Re: "Tossups on Hard Answerlines" -

In my estimation the tossup answers below were the "hard" answerlines for this tournament.

Clovis
In the Penal Colony
heaps
Burgundy
Soseki
Lucia de Lamermoor
ETA Hoffman

Again - the editors didn't deliberately write tossups on these answerlines, nor did we intend to play some big experiment with the audience. They were slightly harder than most of the other TUs - and we consciously let them into the set because they wouldn't have been out of place at a MUT or EFT (and its reincarnations.)

I get it - we could have refactored these into easier answerlines. But we're seeing somewhere around 80-85% tossup conversion (going off round reports in the stats for the various sites.) I believe the numbers reported by SQBS are actually TU points/TUH which means negs are also counted. So I'd guess that the conversion rate is a bit higher than the 80-85% range. In my estimation this is great news. There were similarly very few teams significantly under 10 ppb, and many more teams around 15 ppb. This tells me that the editors did a great job of hitting difficulty targets for the most part - we did most things right and bought us some leeway to experiment with the harder tossups.

If you disagree with this assessment I'd love to know.

Anecdotally, I thought most of the dead tossups I saw were in lit and arts. Richard Sheridan, Mahfouz, Millais, Gericault. Even Auden went dead in my room somehow.

I think for ACF Fall (and ICCS and high school tournaments), there's a very narrow answer space of "easy" lit / arts / music to ask about, so there's often a tradeoff between writing something easy and writing something fresh. Maybe those are good categories to use more common-link tossups. Some players sounded annoyed by the coincidence of tossups on colours, but I thought those were all good tossups that played well.

I think it is nearly unavoidable to produce a tournament of this magnitude without expecting a few questions which deviate from the bulk difficulty of the rest of the set. The answers identified probably do tend to skew in that direction, but I wouldn't say it's necessarily a bad thing to have a handful of outliers (especially if it rewards teams with deeper knowledge). Too many such harder-than-bulk questions may be a concern, but I don't feel that happened here whatsoever.

Or said slightly differently: I am not calling for those answers to have been reworked (maybe other folks feel differently); I was just pointing out a peculiarity with the set in regard to last year's incarnation. That is, I don't know how common it is to see a "hard" bonus answer migrate into TU answer space within the span of a year, for the same tournament.

But Mike's right: the staging of the bonus from 2013 on "In the Penal Colony" by not dropping Kafka as a clue artificially inflated its difficulty level a bit in that context.

As said, overall I thought this set was fine.

I enjoyed this tournament overall.

I will note that there were four different tossups on gold (including the one on gold leaf in art); and even though they were in separate categories, I definitely held off on buzzing in with gold more with each subsequent tossup. There was, I think, also a bonus part on gold.

I think this was, overall, a good set. The only things I have to mention right now (since I don't have the full set with me) is that the Taiping Rebellion tossup claimed it occurred during the Ming dynasty (should be Qing), and that I felt some of the literature answerlines seemed to skew harder than the rest of the set (in addition to the tossups that were brought up already, a few of the easy parts in bonuses, I felt, were a bit too hard), but I guess that can easily happen when you have 3(?) people working on the same category, and it didn't seem to affect teams much, so it's a minor issue.

It seems like many or most of the questions that skewed difficult were in my categories; I'm sorry for that. There was no particular intention behind the amusingly bad coincidence of a previous Fall's hard part morphing into a tossup answer.

I'm quite grateful to John, Matt, and Rob for preventing a couple of even worse ideas from making the cut.

Gautam wrote:Re: "Tossups on Hard Answerlines" -

In my estimation the tossup answers below were the "hard" answerlines for this tournament.

Clovis
In the Penal Colony
heaps
Burgundy
Soseki
Lucia de Lamermoor
ETA Hoffman

Again - the editors didn't deliberately write tossups on these answerlines, nor did we intend to play some big experiment with the audience. They were slightly harder than most of the other TUs - and we consciously let them into the set because they wouldn't have been out of place at a MUT or EFT (and its reincarnations.)

I get it - we could have refactored these into easier answerlines. But we're seeing somewhere around 80-85% tossup conversion (going off round reports in the stats for the various sites.) I believe the numbers reported by SQBS are actually TU points/TUH which means negs are also counted. So I'd guess that the conversion rate is a bit higher than the 80-85% range. In my estimation this is great news. There were similarly very few teams significantly under 10 ppb, and many more teams around 15 ppb. This tells me that the editors did a great job of hitting difficulty targets for the most part - we did most things right and bought us some leeway to experiment with the harder tossups.

If you disagree with this assessment I'd love to know.

I think this is a good assessment. Maybe I went on a Kafka study bender at some point in high school, but In the Penal Colony didn't strike me as hard. I remember it being a pretty common HS bonus part for Kafka. Maybe Soseki was a bit hard but I didn't have a problem with any of these as answer lines

I liked the packets a lot. I thought the second (I think?) clue of the Yorktown tossup, referencing the band playing the "World Turned Upside Down" or whatever it is was a bit easy for a second clue, but that could be just me. I feel like that is in every high school us history textbook.
I also felt like the classical history completely disappeared from the face of the earth following lunch (aka around round 7 for me) but that may have just been a packet order anomaly and I may have just not noticed some.

By the by - if you've pointed out errors in this thread I've been fixing them. I'd also like to thank Jeff Hoppes for catching a bunch of errors and sending them my way.

There were some inaccuracies with the Canadian content in the set.

1. Chief Donnaconna was from Stadaconna, not Hochelaga.
2. Lord Selkirk founded the Red River Colony decades before Louis Riel was born. Riel is the founder of Manitoba, not the Red River Colony.
3. Baptist Day is not a real holiday. The shortest, correct Anglicized name is St. John Baptist Day.

Other things:

1. The lede-in to the Frederick the Great tossup doesn't rule out a similar story about potatoes involving Parmentier and Louis XVI.
2. The Tank Man incident technically happened on nearby Chang'an Avenue, not Tiananmen Square.

I would like to congratulate ACF on updating its position regarding which colony Roger Williams founded.

I haven't thoroughly read through the set, but one thing I remember in particular was the tossup on Tiananmen Square. The first line said that "this location" displayed a statement claiming that a man was "30% right and 70% wrong". I'm assuming this clue refers to Democracy Wall, which isn't really part of Tiananmen Square (it's actually like 1 mile away). This really confused me because I knew the first clue was referring to Democracy Wall, but I figured that was way too hard to be the answer, so I just had no clue what to buzz for three more sentences.

Masked Canadian History Bandit wrote:lede-in

hee hee hee

We promised to upload the set today, but I haven't had a chance to make some of the corrections I would have liked.

For now you can download the set from here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/kpfnkfo9q259j ... 4.zip?dl=0

I'll work on the remaining fixes and post here (and on the db) when the fixes are all done.

-Gautam

Louisville is spelled incorrectly in the name of the packet to which we contributed, which is a grievous mistake that must be corrected.

sephirothrr wrote:Louisville is spelled incorrectly in the name of the packet to which we contributed, which is a grievous mistake that must be corrected.

You should change your Louisville's name to Liousville to be more like Joseph Liouville. I even made a twitter joke about it ages ago!

https://twitter.com/gkandlikar/status/5 ... 8534075392

jkjk, I'll fix it soon.

EDIT: Fixed.

So this is the first time I've had a chance to look at the complete question set, and one thing that jumps out right away in my pack (et al, since others certainly had their parts added) is the "Orlando, Florida" TU. When I originally wrote that question, I deliberately omitted references to the local Disney parks since they're technically not in Orlando proper (more of the Bay Lake / Lake Buena Vista area).

FWIW, I work in Orlando and live in one of the suburbs here (hence that I'm in an OSU "distance program").

I think running with the theme park idea was a clever take on my original submission, but for non-central Floridians just be aware that Disney is its own thing outside of Orlando. If it were to be cleaned up, simply changing a few words to establish that Epcot and Disney World are "near this major city" would be sufficient and still accurate, IMO.

Also --- without doing any sort of research on this, I'm mildly curious if this is the first time "The Holy Land Experience" has entered the quiz bowl arena. If so, then that is way overdue.

I really enjoyed playing ACF Fall for the first time, and I thank everyone involved in writing, editing, and hosting. I really enjoyed the questions, minus the dearth of non Greco-Roman myth in the packets I heard. I also thought the tossup on Einstein included being offered the presidency of Israel rather early. This ended up being a buzzer race in a close game, and I feel as if this is once of the most well known (non-science) facts about his life.

Besides that, the set and competition were great.

Masked Canadian History Bandit wrote:There were some inaccuracies with the Canadian content in the set.

1. Chief Donnaconna was from Stadaconna, not Hochelaga.
2. Lord Selkirk founded the Red River Colony decades before Louis Riel was born. Riel is the founder of Manitoba, not the Red River Colony.
3. Baptist Day is not a real holiday. The shortest, correct Anglicized name is St. John Baptist Day.

Other things:

1. The lede-in to the Frederick the Great tossup doesn't rule out a similar story about potatoes involving Parmentier and Louis XVI.
2. The Tank Man incident technically happened on nearby Chang'an Avenue, not Tiananmen Square.

Embarrassingly, all of those were mine. Thanks for the feedback.

Corry wrote: I haven't thoroughly read through the set, but one thing I remember in particular was the tossup on Tiananmen Square. The first line said that "this location" displayed a statement claiming that a man was "30% right and 70% wrong". I'm assuming this clue refers to Democracy Wall, which isn't really part of Tiananmen Square (it's actually like 1 mile away). This really confused me because I knew the first clue was referring to Democracy Wall, but I figured that was way too hard to be the answer, so I just had no clue what to buzz for three more sentences.

Most sources seem to agree that the "30% right and 70% wrong" poster was posted in Tienanmen Square, although it was part of the Democracy Wall movement. That said, expecting people to know or figure out that detail is pretty stupid--sorry for the confusing clue.

Shashmaqam wrote:the dearth of non Greco-Roman myth

Corner Grocery Store wrote:I don't know if it was me, but this tournament seemed to have a lot more Graeco-Roman myth

Out of all the questions, 3/7 (2/2) were entirely non-GR, 6/7 (4/4) were entirely GR, and 5/0 (4/0) were mixed common links of varying degrees of GR-ness. The numbers in parentheses are the number of editor's questions in that group, not including questions that were reworked entirely but based on an idea found in the original submission.

In general, non-GR myth bonus submissions were much easier to work with - it was much easier to edit a boring "Name these Egyptian gods FTPE" submission into something interesting, than it was to edit a tossup on Thor with six lines of poor and awfully worded clues. For accessibility reasons, the common-link tossups I wrote all ended up having at least one GR clue. The myth distribution ended up skewed towards the GR side, though since this is Fall and the average player is likely to be more familiar with GR myth, I was fine with it.

This is a little pedantic, but the tossup on German literature says that Kleist's The Broken Jug is a novel instead of a play.

Just some grammatical minutiae/weird wording I noticed while reading tonight:

Rockford Auburn A + Cal Poly SLO wrote: This material was used as the background for many paintings by medieval artists like Duccio and Cimabue, and it was also used for halos until much later.

Rockford Auburn A + Cal Poly SLO wrote: [10] Mendelssohn’s trip to Scotland also inspired this overture, which alternately titled Fingal’s Cave.

So I read through all of ACF Fall in a pretty detailed manner over the past few days, both as a test to check how my low-level generalism is doing these days and to see how the set turned out. I really liked the set -- I think it's by far the most interesting and well-crafted ACF Fall there's been in years, in terms of creating questions that weren't just 'the millionth novice tossup on cholesterol' or what have you. Much of that came from this editing team's admitted willingness to spice up difficulty a bit beyond the "high school with a small plus sign" of the past few Falls, or to put it another way to view the tournament as a bona fide "introduction to college quizbowl" with more outliers / a larger high-difficulty tail rather than a "farewell to high school". It seems from statistics that the field was largely able to handle this. But it also speaks well of this editing team's ability to go back to the sources, including easy works and basic concepts, and find fresh clues for them which reflect depth of engagement with things that a wide number of teams get exposure to.

That "bridges" question excepted, it seemed to me like this tournament's Geography questions did a very good job of staying interesting without sacrificing too much accessibility or clue quality, and the "conceptual geography" bonus or two was a fun twist. I also see that some of the trademark BHSAT whimsy was brought to these trash questions, much to my delight.

That said, I, like many other readers of this set, also saw a disturbingly high number of questionable-accuracy clues or downright factual errors. Here are some more that the thread hasn't touched on yet:

• Reliable sources and past packets agree that Arnolfini's wife is not pregnant; that's just what dresses of the time looked like on people.
• "Duomo" means "cathedral," not "dome." So saying that Brunelleschi designed "the Duomo of Florence Cathedral" is tautological (and false).
• The second sentence in the Calhoun tossup, "As a Secretary of State under John Tyler, this man resolved the Oregon Boundary Dispute," is suboptimal in many ways. For one thing, Tyler had three Secretaries of State, and the ones that come to mind first are Daniel Webster (for doing Webster-Ashburton and being the only member of W.H. Harrison's cabinet to successfully hold his job after Harrison's death) and then Abel Upshur (for blowing up along with the Princeton), so you'd want to say something like "third Secretary of State" to explicitly rule out the other two. Secondly, I am also uncertain how Calhoun "resolved" this issue when it (and the well-known "Fifty-Four Forty or Fight" sloganeering) was a central issue in the 1844 election which brought in Tyler's successor, James Polk, and Polk's cabinet secured the agreement in 1846 (under Secretary of State James Buchanan).
• Plymouth was not founded as "part of" Massachusetts Bay Colony; they were founded separately and administered separately until the 1690s.
• The leadin to the Washington Crossing the Delaware bonus ("A more recent painting depicts three cross-dressing founding fathers standing in front of this painting") does not refer to anything real. If I had to venture a guess what that is supposed to mean, I'd guess you're trying to claim that the three women depicted in Daughters of Revolution are actually men dressed in drag, and "cross-dressing founding fathers" at that? If so, I don't know where that claim comes from (oh wait yes I do) or what the proof is for it. People with art history PhDs seem pretty confident in the actual story, namely that Wood was satirizing a particular class of middle-aged women of his time who, through organizations like the Daughters of the American Revolution, were content to have an aristocratic and antiquiarian view of what American society ought to look like, to their own benefit and their Founding Father ancestors' shame. Given that Wood himself referred to the subjects he painted as "Tory gals," I am very curious to hear what sort of analysis would lead to the conclusion that he painted "cross-dressing founding fathers in drag," or that doing so would clarify, rather than muddle, Wood's intended look at 1930s middle-aged women.

I don't actually know if there's been an above-average number of errors reported thus far (given that the average number of factual errors in a set's first run is pretty high), but it seems like there are too many, which is certainly a big negative for a set which does a lot of things right. This is just a reminder that a huge part of editing is ensuring factual accuracy and using legitimate sources for your claims. All of the editors working on this set are talented people who have further editing ahead in their futures if they want it -- my message to all of you is to go that extra mile to ensure your impressions of what a painting must depict, what a word must mean, etc. actually check out with sources. It may seem like teams will just get the question anyway if it sounds accurate enough, but if the words aren't actually accurate, they might not, particularly if their knowledge comes from non-packet sources.

So I get what the "cross-dressing" clue is referring to--I assume it was just a piece of Wiki cribbing, but some scholars, such as R. Tripp Evans (whom I don't know and takes a rather sexually driven look at Grant Wood's art) and Karal Ann Marling (whom I do know) have analyzed how the women are painted to resemble the masculine Founding Fathers. The clue is rather obscure and terribly written (Marling isn't literally saying the women are cross dressing men but are just painted to look like men), and probably should have been dropped or reworked, but it isn't quite a made-up thing.

Matthew Jackson wrote:

• Reliable sources and past packets agree that Arnolfini's wife is not pregnant; that's just what dresses of the time looked like on people.
• "Duomo" means "cathedral," not "dome." So saying that Brunelleschi designed "the Duomo of Florence Cathedral" is tautological (and false).
• The leadin to the Washington Crossing the Delaware bonus ("A more recent painting depicts three cross-dressing founding fathers standing in front of this painting") does not refer to anything real. If I had to venture a guess what that is supposed to mean, I'd guess you're trying to claim that the three women depicted in Daughters of Revolution are actually men dressed in drag, and "cross-dressing founding fathers" at that? If so, I don't know where that claim comes from (oh wait yes I do) or what the proof is for it. People with art history PhDs seem pretty confident in the actual story, namely that Wood was satirizing a particular class of middle-aged women of his time who, through organizations like the Daughters of the American Revolution, were content to have an aristocratic and antiquiarian view of what American society ought to look like, to their own benefit and their Founding Father ancestors' shame. Given that Wood himself referred to the subjects he painted as "Tory gals," I am very curious to hear what sort of analysis would lead to the conclusion that he painted "cross-dressing founding fathers in drag," or that doing so would clarify, rather than muddle, Wood's intended look at 1930s middle-aged women.

These all slipped past me (should've fact-checked those questions); mea culpa. For what it's worth, the "bridges" question was "other art" (architecture).

Matthew Jackson wrote: I really liked the set -- I think it's by far the most interesting and well-crafted ACF Fall there's been in years, in terms of creating questions that weren't just 'the millionth novice tossup on cholesterol' or what have you. Much of that came from this editing team's admitted willingness to spice up difficulty a bit beyond the "high school with a small plus sign" of the past few Falls, or to put it another way to view the tournament as a bona fide "introduction to college quizbowl" with more outliers / a larger high-difficulty tail rather than a "farewell to high school". It seems from statistics that the field was largely able to handle this. But it also speaks well of this editing team's ability to go back to the sources, including easy works and basic concepts, and find fresh clues for them which reflect depth of engagement with things that a wide number of teams get exposure to.

Thank you for the kind words, Matt. I think the editing team made a genuine attempt to find interesting clues and test interesting structures to tossups. And the extra effort did not come at a cost of time-inefficiencies. During my first attempt at editing ACF Fall back in '08, I found it very challenging to maintain a level of interesting-ness to questions and simultaneously be super-efficient at editing.

I read some of the questions to my father on a long road-trip to Chicago; he's generally well read and has a high-level understanding of how quizbowl works and he had feedback along similar lines. So It's good to see similar feedback coming from you.

Matthew Jackson wrote: I don't actually know if there's been an above-average number of errors reported thus far (given that the average number of factual errors in a set's first run is pretty high), but it seems like there are too many, which is certainly a big negative for a set which does a lot of things right.

Your point is noted. I'll take responsibility for the higher than normal rate of errors in the set. In our split head editing responsibilities, I did a lot more of the question content checking. I tried whenever I could to scrutinize each and every clue. It was a little harder to do that this time around compared to my undergrad days - mostly out of lack of practice. Similarly, otherwise busy work schedules and the relatively rapid clip at which questions were coming in meant that I had to be judicious in deciding which questions I scrutinized questions. I let more inaccuracies slip through than I'd like.

From the VCU A, Central Connecticut State, and UVA C packet:

12. This leader ended Balcha Safo's revolt by getting him drunk at a feast and bribing his soldiers. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this emperor revered as a messiah by Rastafarians. He was deposed by Italy's 1935 invasion of his country.
ANSWER: Haile Selassie I [or Tafari Makonnen Woldemikael]
[10] Haile Selassie ruled this African country. Once home to the Christian Axumite kingdom, this country's current capital, Addis Ababa, was founded by Menelik II.
ANSWER: Ethiopia
[10] This emperor ruled Ethiopia between 1889 and 1913. He rejected the terms of the Treaty of Wuchale, after which his forces defeated those of Italian General Baratieri at Adowa in 1896.
ANSWER: Menelik II [prompt on “Menelik”; accept Sahle Maryam]

Are there no specific rules or guidelines on whether the answerline to a bonus part can be mentioned in a previous part of the same question? I understand that someone who knows who Menelik II is should still be able to convert it, but there is also the strong possibility of a team ruling out Menelik II as an answer since he had already been mentioned.

no ice wrote:From the VCU A, Central Connecticut State, and UVA C packet:

12. This leader ended Balcha Safo's revolt by getting him drunk at a feast and bribing his soldiers. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this emperor revered as a messiah by Rastafarians. He was deposed by Italy's 1935 invasion of his country.
ANSWER: Haile Selassie I [or Tafari Makonnen Woldemikael]
[10] Haile Selassie ruled this African country. Once home to the Christian Axumite kingdom, this country's current capital, Addis Ababa, was founded by Menelik II.
ANSWER: Ethiopia
[10] This emperor ruled Ethiopia between 1889 and 1913. He rejected the terms of the Treaty of Wuchale, after which his forces defeated those of Italian General Baratieri at Adowa in 1896.
ANSWER: Menelik II [prompt on “Menelik”; accept Sahle Maryam]

Are there no specific rules or guidelines on whether the answerline to a bonus part can be mentioned in a previous part of the same question? I understand that someone who knows who Menelik II is should still be able to convert it, but there is also the strong possibility of a team ruling out Menelik II as an answer since he had already been mentioned.

This should never happen and was likely a mistake by the editors/writers.

the charm wrote:
This should never happen and was likely a mistake by the editors/writers.

whoops. Dylan's right. That was totally a last-minute change I introduced to make the 3rd part of that bonus easier. My bad. Sorry about that.

Any chance these will be uploaded to the database soon?

Edit: Also, how many packets of questions went unused at Fall?