What's up quiz bowlers?
Michigan Academic Competitions is pleased to announce our annual Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Tournament, taking place on Saturday January 19 2008, the Saturday immediately before Martin Luther King Day. The tournament will be a mirror of Maryland’s TIT XXII (
http://www.hsquizbowl.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=4608), edited by Jonathan Magin.
Also, here is a shameless plug for the 13th Ann B. Davis: A Barker’s Dozen pop culture tournament, to take place the following day (Sunday, January 20 2008)! Everyone should go! Links to relevant info are here:
http://www.mikeburger.com/abd2008.html
and here:
http://www.hsquizbowl.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=4698
CONTACTS
Questions about logistics, registration and all things not packet-related should be addressed to Tournament Director Andy Kravis (
[email protected]). Questions about packets, distributions, and the like should be addressed to someone at Maryland, presumably Mike Bentley (I will edit this if such a thing is untrue) at
[email protected], because he'll be more likely to answer your questions about such things.
PRICING (copied from TIT, with minor adjustments):
+$100 - Base Fee
-$50 - Packet submitted by Saturday, November 24th.
-$25 - Packet submitted by Saturday, December 8th.
+$0 - Packet submitted by Saturday, December 22nd.
+$50 - Packet submitted by Saturday, December 29th.
+$100 - No packet submitted.
-$5 - Buzzer discount per school.
-$10 - Competent moderator discount per school
-$20 - Travel discount per team for coming more than 200 miles one way as judged by Google Maps.
+$10 - Formatting penalty for formatting your questions incorrectly (see formatting section below).
-$20 - Prize for the best unedited packet received in general, and by the best Division II (first two years play quizbowl) only team.
Minimum Fee Per Team: $40.
PACKET GUIDELINES (Copied from TIT, again with minor locational adjustments):
Please send a copy of your packet to me, Andy Kravis, at (
[email protected]), and I will check it for formatting issues and forward it to the appropriate people.
Distribution (26/26):
5/5 History (1/1 US, 1/1 European, 1/1 Ancient, 1/1 World, 1/1 Your Choice [please do not write both of these on the same subject])
5/5 Literature (1/1 American, 1/1 British, 1/1 European, 1/1 World, and 1/1 Any of the above; try to include at least 1/1 drama, 1/1 novels, and 1/1 poetry)
5/5 Science (1/1 Physics, 1/1 Chemistry, 1/1 Biology, 1/1 Minor Science like Computer Science, Non-Computational Math, Geology, Astronomy, Earth Science, Engineering, etc., 1/1 Your Choice)
1/1 Extra History, Literature, Science (please do not write on the same category for both the tossup and bonus)
3/3 RMP (2/2 Religion and Mythology, 1/1 Philosophy)
3/3 Fine Arts (1/1 Visual Fine Arts like Painting and Sculpture, 1/1 Classical Music, 1/1 Your Choice or other like Architecture, Artistic Film, Dance, Opera or more painting / music.)
2/2 Social Science (Economics, Sociology, Psychology, Anthropology, Linguistics, etc.)
2/2 Your choice (any additional questions above), pop culture, common link, general knowledge, current events, misc.
Please vary all your questions by time period, region of the world (when applicable) and genre. Also vary the type of question you ask. For example, do not write 5 literature tossups on 19th century British novelists. A better literature selection would include tossups on authors, works and characters, on American, British, and World literature, and on fiction, drama, and poetry.
Difficulty (Copied from TIT):
Please keep your tossups between ACF Fall and ACF Regionals level difficulty (or, at about the difficulty level of last year's Penn Bowl). When in question, err on the easier side. It is not a good idea to explore canon expansion (i.e. writing about things that have never come up at tournaments before) in most of your tossups.
Every bonus should have a clear easy, medium and hard part. Almost every team in the tournament should be converting the easy part of the bonus, while a little more than half of the teams should be converting the medium part. The hard part of a bonus should be able to be answered by those with in-depth knowledge in the field, or approximately one quarter of the teams.
Question Length (Copied from TIT):
All of the following lengths apply to documents written in Word with 1 inch margins (change these from the default), and a 10 point Times New Roman font.
Final tossups will be between 5.5 and 7.5 lines long. However, we'd prefer that you submit tossups on the long side (or even over the 7.5 line limit), since it's always easier for us to get rid of clues that we don't like than to add additional clues by ourselves.
Bonus parts should be kept within reason. Do not write extremely lengthy leadins or bonus parts (try to keep them under 2 lines). Also do not write extremely short bonuses or list bonuses, as these are typically not very interesting. The vast majority of your bonuses should be 10-10-10. Please do not write any 30-20-10 bonuses, and avoid bonuses with more than four answer parts. Do not write any 5-10-15 bonuses, since making a single part worth half the bonus is less fair than having three parts worth the same amount of points.
Formatting (Copied from TIT):
Please format your questions in the following matter:
1/1 Unfunny Meta Example Questions:
The person involved in this event is starting a rumor that it was actually a planned occurrence to get himself mentioned in a meta question in Matt Weiner's canceled Chicago Open trash tournament. Immediately after this event occurred, one person was unable to identify Okazaki Fragments. It was preceded by Jeremy Eaton answering a tossup on time dilation. The person responsible for this event blamed not getting enough sleep the night before and the two hour drive to Richmond, but most of all just plain not paying attention. Occurring in a game against South Carolina at the 2007 VCU Open, it is now immortalized in the YTMND page Nude Descending a Gas Chamber. FTP, identify this action wherein Mike Bentley erroneously answered "The Armory Show" for "Auschwitz".
ANSWER: Worst Buzz (also accept Nude Descending a Gas Chamber before mentioned, Mike Bentley's Embarrassing Neg with The Armory Show on the Auschwitz Question at the 2007 Illinois Novice Tournament, and clear knowledge equivalents; do not accept just "Armory Show" or "Auschwitz")
Answer the following about a certain comic strip, FTPE.
[10] Like Chris Ray, the title character of this Dik Browne comic strip has red hair and a big beard, and is also illiterate and bathes only once a year.
ANSWER: Hagar the Horrible
[10] Using Wikipedia might erroneously lead you to believe that Hagar the Horrible was based on this play by Henrik Ibsen in which Sigurd defeats Hjördis by killing her sentinel, a white bear.
ANSWER: The Vikings at Helgeland
[10] If Jonathan Magin had his way, Hagar the Horrible and all other comic strips would be inspired by this Robert Louis Stevenson novel about some Scottish dude and his buried treasure.
ANSWER: The Master of Ballantrae
DO NOT USE ANY AUTOMATIC WORD FORMATTING EXCEPT FOR SMART QUOTES. Specifically, do not use any indentation or automatic numbering in your packets. Submit all packets in .doc or .rtf format please.
If questions are not correctly formatted (at the discretion of the editors), your packet will be returned for you to reformat. If you submit your packet at the deadline and it is rejected for formatting issues, you will be charged a $10 formatting fee (and asked to reformat the packet), but you will not have to pay any additional fees for missing the deadline.
Misc (Copied from TIT):
As with all packet submission tournaments, questions must be blind to all other teams attending the tournament. Specifically, if a school is sending more than one team to the tournament, members of different teams should not know of each others' questions.
Please do not plagiarize questions. Do not copy direct passages and phrases from the sources you use to write questions. Additionally, do not write questions directly out of Wikipedia. While Wikipedia can be a useful source in finding preliminary information on a question, we encourage you to use more in-depth, scholarly and peer reviewed sources when writing your questions. Please see various question writing guides such as Jerry's guide for more information on where to find good sources for writing questions.
TO REGISTER: Send me, Andy Kravis, an e-mail (
[email protected]) with all pertinent information (number of teams, members of teams, buzzers, other applicable discounts, anything else I should know), and I will send a confirmation e-mail back to insure that the registration info is all in order.
Regarding payment: We want your money before you play. Checks should be made out to Michigan Academic Competitions and they can either be mailed to me (e-mail me for address info) before the tournament, or you can pay the morning of the tournament. I will make sure you know how much you owe when you e-mail me to register, pending packet discounts/fees, which I will keep track of.
Teams that have less experience writing questions may want to consult the
Michigan Memorandum on question writing, available on the web at:
http://www.umich.edu/~uac/mac/rules/memorandum2002.html
Along with its appendix:
http://www.umich.edu/~uac/mac/rules/appendix2002.html
BASIC LOGISTICS:
If you're wondering how to get to Ann Arbor and where to stay once you get there, some general suggestions can be found at:
http://www.umich.edu/~uac/mac/faq/part2.html
And, as previously stated, you can always e-mail me (
[email protected]) with questions.
We look forward to seeing you in January!
- Andy