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Old college threads.
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More Question Feedback

Post by mujason »

I might as well go for some feedback on my questions (29 in DI, 40 in DII).
DI:
Round 1: tu Albert Fall
bonuses on Hobey Baker (hockey, Kariya, Drury); Deccan plateau (India, Ghats, Hyderabad); Lollapalooza 2009 (Kings of Leon, Gomez, Airborne Toxic Event).
Round 2: tus Bleeding Love; Queensland
bonuses on Outland Trophy winners (Dorsey, Bruce Smith, Pace); Tony-winning musicals (Jersey Boys, Thoroughly Modern Millie, In the Heights); Wisconsin (Fox River, Lake Winnebago, Oshkosh)
Round 3: tu Ryan Braun
bonus on Senate Committee chairs (Harkin, Leahy, Baucus)
Round 4: bonus on 1930s college football (White, Berwanger, O'Brien)
Round 8: tus football Harrisons; Sardinia
Round 9: tu Draco (constellation)
bonus on Brazil (Rio de Janerio, Salvador, Santos)
Round 10: tus Abscam; Bob Stoops
bonus on Honduras (Zelaya, Micheletti, Arias)
Round 11: tu Ebbets Field
bonuses Jamie Moyer (Moyer, Phillies, Mariners); Josh Hartnett (Pearl Harbor, Lucky Number Slevin, Black Dahlia)
Round 12: bonus on film devils (Pacino, Stormare, Hurley)
Round 13: tus Carol Kennicott; Ethelred the Unready
Round 14: tu Nathan Fillion
bonus Chinese bodies of water (Yellow, Bohai, East China Sea)
Round 16: bonuses on chess players (Kasparov, Carlsen, Anand); Islamic calendar (15th century, 354, Muharram)

D II:
Round 1: bonus on baseball stadiums renames (U.S. Cellular, Progressive, Rogers)
Round 2: tus on Bleeding Love; Queensland
bonuses on Verdi characters (Aida, Rigoletto, Violetta Valery); Outland trophy winners (Dorsey, Bruce Smith, Pace)
Round 3: tu Carl Edwards
bonuses on The Waste Land (Eliot, chess, Buddha); former cast of Mad TV (LaMarr, Sullivan, Herman); Kara DioGuardi (American Idol, Enrique Iglesias, Ashlee Simpson)
Round 4: tu Honduras
bonuses on NBA Western Conference coaches (Sloan, Popovich, Nelson); rivers of Alexander the Great (Nile, Indus, Granicus); elections (Iran, Indonesia, El Salvador)
Round 5: bonus on House Ways and Means (Rangel, Michigan, Cantor)
Round 6: bonus on Sinbad the Sailor (roc, Sri Lanka, elephant)
Round 7: bonus on (Yoruba, Africa, Sierra Leone)
Round 8: tus on football Harrisons; Sardinia
bonuses on literary elements (tin, arsenic, neon); Fred Friendly (Murrow, Harvest of Shame, George Clooney); Haiti earthquake (Port-au-Prince, 7.0, Clinton)
Round 9: tu dative
bonuses on Brazil geography (Brazil, Rio de Janerio, Santos); Bravo shows (Top Chef, Shear Genius, Launch my Line)
Round 10: tus Julianne Hough; Bob Stoops
bonus on (Honduras, Zelaya, Arias)
Round 11: tu Canberra
bonus on (Idris Elba, The Office, The Wire)
Round 12: tus on Billy Flynn; St. Sebastian
bonuses on Alexander Pope (Dunciad, Essay on Criticism, Rape of the Lock); (Paper Moon, Moonstruck, Moonraker)
Round 14: bonuses on (Kirk, Coakley, Scott Brown); Christopher Guest (Best in Show, Princess Bride, Nigel Tufnel); Russ Pennell (Arizona, Lute Olsen, Scottie Pippen)
Round 15: bonuses on French Open women (Henin, Ivanovic, Russia); John Connor (Terminator, Bale, Stahl)
Round 16: tu James Spader
bonus on Appalachian Trail (Georgia, Clingmans Dome, Mount Katahdin)
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Post by Papa's in the House »

Sorry to hear that you were the one to write the "literary elements" bonus.
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Post by grapesmoker »

Frazer Yeats wrote:Sorry to hear that you were the one to write the "literary elements" bonus.
In what sense were they literary?
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Post by MicroEStudent »

For 1930's college football, which one of those guys is the easy part? I see three medium parts or two mediums and a hard (Berwanger). Is the Supreme Court clue supposed to make White the easy part?
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Post by mujason »

Literary elements, where the answers were element names:

For 10 points each--name these chemical elements from literary titles:
A. In G\:unter Grass's novel, Oskar Matzerath's instrument was made of this metal.
answer: _tin_
B. In Joseph Kesselring's hit play, the murderous Brewster ladies combine this with "Old Lace."
answer: _arsenic_
C. This gas describes the "Vernacular" in the title of a 1994 poetry collection that won a Pulitzer for Yusef Komunyakaa.
answer: _neon_

As for the football bonus, White as gettable as he was on the Supreme Court, Berwanger was gettable as the first Heisman winner, and O'Brien was gettable as he has a quarterback award named after him.
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Post by Quantum Mushroom Billiard Hat »

That Wisconsin bonus seemed really hard. I drove through the area about 6 months ago, my dad is from Fond du Lac, and I had a hard time getting 20. Which is meant to be the easy part?
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Re: More Question Feedback

Post by MicroEStudent »

mujason wrote: As for the football bonus, White as gettable as he was on the Supreme Court, Berwanger was gettable as the first Heisman winner, and O'Brien was gettable as he has a quarterback award named after him.
Those aren't necessarily important things. White being on the Supreme Court is not a sports clue and Johnny Unitas also has an award named after him for being the nation's most outstanding senior quarterback. (I realize there is a difference in the award and time period for O'Brien/Unitas, but there could be some confusion.)

Perhaps changing one of the bonus parts to "Heisman Trophy" may have improved conversion and provided an easy part. For non-football fans I could see this being a very difficult bonus, unless you've heard the stock Supreme Court clue (I've seen this clue in many tournaments on the archive site). You only ever hear about Berwanger or O'Brien during college football awards season and White is only brought up when mentioning the Supreme Court or former star athletes in government (e.g. Gerald Ford, who could have been a good bonus part)

Noted good team Michigan A 0'd this in our room and I believe the other US teams at the McMaster site did as well.

EDIT: Wrong sports bonus information
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Post by Chico the Rainmaker »

Can someone post the dative question? I have a comment but I want to make sure I'm remembering it correctly.
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Post by Cheynem »

Who wrote the DII literary titles/baseball teams bonus? That's just the sort of crazy stuff I'd like to see a whole packet of.
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Post by Important Bird Area »

Hard Tack Come Again No More wrote:Can someone post the dative question? I have a comment but I want to make sure I'm remembering it correctly.
There were a couple of problems in the version read last weekend that we already fixed. Here's the revised version:
When in this grammatical case, Polish plural nouns carry the ending -owi. In Latin, the word for "citizen", ~civis~, becomes ~civi~. In German, it always follows the prepositions ~aus~, ~bei~, ~mit~, or ~zu~. In all these languages it indicates a verb's (*) indirect object. For 10 points--name this grammatical case used in the example "He gave me the book."
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Post by Chico the Rainmaker »

Thanks. I thought I heard that "cives ends in is" or something in this case, which caused me to buzz with genitive, but it is entirely possible I misheard.

It seemed like the MLB stadiums bonus and NBA coaches bonus were written to a different standard of difficulty. Maybe it's because I only really follow the National League, but is there an easy part in US Cellular/Progressive/Rogers? Which one of those is supposed to be the hard part? Whereas the NBA coaches one seemed to give a free 30 to anyone who remotely follows basketball. The longest-tenured coach in NBA history, the second-most successful coach in the NBA and the winningest active coach doesn't seem like that much of a challenge to anyone who knows much about the NBA. Perhaps I am using the "I know it and therefore it is easy" argument, but it seems like the NBA bonus could've benefited from a Lionel Hollins or Scott Skiles hard part and the MLB bonus could've benefited from an easy part like Coors Field if you wanted to stick with the corporate theme.
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Post by cvdwightw »

So this whole thing reminds me of something that NAQT's been prone to do for a long time, and that's have trash questions that are (intentionally or unintentionally) wildly out of whack with its academic stuff.

Perhaps NAQT views things much differently than I do, but for knowledge at SCT level I've thought that the "easy" part of the bonus should reward "you have some casual interest and/or basic knowledge of the topic at hand" and the "hard" part should reward "you have deep knowledge of the topic at hand." This SCT (and previous SCTs) have had a lot of "feast or famine" trash, where you get 30 points if you have any basic interest in the topic of the bonus and struggle to get 10 if you don't. Generally I think NAQT needs to make the easy parts easier and in some cases make the hard parts harder; I wouldn't be surprised to see this year's trash conversion to be a lot of 0's and 30's and not so many 10's and 20's, which is the opposite of what you'd expect in the conversion distribution of well-written bonuses (some 0s, lots of 10s, slightly fewer 20s, some 30s).
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Re: More Question Feedback

Post by ... and the chaos of Mexican modernity »

cvdwightw wrote:So this whole thing reminds me of something that NAQT's been prone to do for a long time, and that's have trash questions that are (intentionally or unintentionally) wildly out of whack with its academic stuff.

Perhaps NAQT views things much differently than I do, but for knowledge at SCT level I've thought that the "easy" part of the bonus should reward "you have some casual interest and/or basic knowledge of the topic at hand" and the "hard" part should reward "you have deep knowledge of the topic at hand." This SCT (and previous SCTs) have had a lot of "feast or famine" trash, where you get 30 points if you have any basic interest in the topic of the bonus and struggle to get 10 if you don't. Generally I think NAQT needs to make the easy parts easier and in some cases make the hard parts harder; I wouldn't be surprised to see this year's trash conversion to be a lot of 0's and 30's and not so many 10's and 20's, which is the opposite of what you'd expect in the conversion distribution of well-written bonuses (some 0s, lots of 10s, slightly fewer 20s, some 30s).
This is what seems to be the general outline for the most part with the other format (ACF). Not that I have anything against NAQT whatsoever, but it seems that the overall result seems to end up being here is 30 points ( A bonus on the 6 wives of Henry VII) or screw you for having basic knowledge of Italian history (a bonus on the rulers of the Duchy of Urbino with a resulting 0). Of course both of those are examples given that weren't in the SCT set, but still I think NAQT needs to see this as a problem for a lot of teams that are not elite. Just look at Nate's example of the 3 1930's college football players, I mean couldn't an easy part just simply be there?
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Post by Captain Sinico »

Almost all of your questions were bad in an astounding variety of ways. You should probably not be allowed to write for this level.

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Post by grapesmoker »

This explains so very much about why I hated these questions.
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Post by MicroEStudent »

We didn't get to play on it, but how in the world is a bonus on chess players a good idea? I get that Kasparov is gettable, but who else other than Fischer at this level? Maybe as a screw you hard part Spassky, but that's it.

Jeff, what category was this put in?
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Post by MicroEStudent »

bt_green_warbler wrote:
Hard Tack Come Again No More wrote:Can someone post the dative question? I have a comment but I want to make sure I'm remembering it correctly.
There were a couple of problems in the version read last weekend that we already fixed. Here's the revised version:
When in this grammatical case, Polish plural nouns carry the ending -owi. In Latin, the word for "citizen", ~civis~, becomes ~civi~. In German, it always follows the prepositions ~aus~, ~bei~, ~mit~, or ~zu~. In all these languages it indicates a verb's (*) indirect object. For 10 points--name this grammatical case used in the example "He gave me the book."
Just a thought, but does editing questions for clarity or any other reason a good idea when there is another site still to go? Is there a chance that these edits allow a team in Region 4 to answer additional questions correctly, thus improving their chances for a wild card bid? I know that this is potentially a small consideration, but I think that all sites should hear the same exact questions even if there are errors.

Just my two cents.
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Post by Important Bird Area »

Old Man of the Mountain wrote:bonus on chess players

Jeff, what category was this put in?
Pop culture/games, which is what it should be.
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Post by Important Bird Area »

Old Man of the Mountain wrote:Just a thought, but does editing questions for clarity or any other reason a good idea when there is another site still to go? Is there a chance that these edits allow a team in Region 4 to answer additional questions correctly, thus improving their chances for a wild card bid? I know that this is potentially a small consideration, but I think that all sites should hear the same exact questions even if there are errors.
Obviously the number of changes that we're making is relatively small; we believe the impact on answerability would be tiny. I for one consider "deliberately using questions with known errors in them" to be bad quizbowl.
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Post by Ringil »

Old Man of the Mountain wrote:We didn't get to play on it, but how in the world is a bonus on chess players a good idea? I get that Kasparov is gettable, but who else other than Fischer at this level? Maybe as a screw you hard part Spassky, but that's it.

Jeff, what category was this put in?
Anand is pretty well known being the world champion at the moment. Also, Carlsen has been in the news lately for being really really young and for having a really high rating (he was even on the front page of Wikipedia!). I don't think that bonus is that impossible.
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Post by cvdwightw »

Ringil wrote:
Old Man of the Mountain wrote:We didn't get to play on it, but how in the world is a bonus on chess players a good idea? I get that Kasparov is gettable, but who else other than Fischer at this level? Maybe as a screw you hard part Spassky, but that's it.

Jeff, what category was this put in?
Anand is pretty well known being the world champion at the moment. Also, Carlsen has been in the news lately for being really really young and for having a really high rating (he was even on the front page of Wikipedia!). I don't think that bonus is that impossible.
It's certainly not impossible, but it's not like Anand or Carlsen is an actual middle-difficulty part of that bonus (as in convertible by half the teams playing). This bonus has like 1 easy and 2 hard parts of relatively equal difficulty. (On the other hand, there is the very-real issue of who is actually a decent middle part in terms of chess players.)
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Post by Gautam »

mujason wrote:I might as well go for some feedback on my questions (29 in DI, 40 in DII).
DI:
Round 1: tu Albert Fall
bonuses on Hobey Baker (hockey, Kariya, Drury); Deccan plateau (India, Ghats, Hyderabad); Lollapalooza 2009 (Kings of Leon, Gomez, Airborne Toxic Event).
Round 2: tus Bleeding Love; Queensland
bonuses on Outland Trophy winners (Dorsey, Bruce Smith, Pace); Tony-winning musicals (Jersey Boys, Thoroughly Modern Millie, In the Heights); Wisconsin (Fox River, Lake Winnebago, Oshkosh)
Round 3: tu Ryan Braun
bonus on Senate Committee chairs (Harkin, Leahy, Baucus)
Round 4: bonus on 1930s college football (White, Berwanger, O'Brien)
Round 8: tus football Harrisons; Sardinia
Round 9: tu Draco (constellation)
bonus on Brazil (Rio de Janerio, Salvador, Santos)
Round 10: tus Abscam; Bob Stoops
bonus on Honduras (Zelaya, Micheletti, Arias)
Round 11: tu Ebbets Field
bonuses Jamie Moyer (Moyer, Phillies, Mariners); Josh Hartnett (Pearl Harbor, Lucky Number Slevin, Black Dahlia)
Round 12: bonus on film devils (Pacino, Stormare, Hurley)
Round 13: tus Carol Kennicott; Ethelred the Unready
Round 14: tu Nathan Fillion
bonus Chinese bodies of water (Yellow, Bohai, East China Sea)
Round 16: bonuses on chess players (Kasparov, Carlsen, Anand); Islamic calendar (15th century, 354, Muharram)
I liked the bonus on Indian Geography (anything about Hyderabad = cool points awarded.) I thought your tossup on Carol Kennicott was decent, but was pretty figure-outable: it was a tossupable female Sinclair Lewis character is how I remember working it out, though maybe I just got lucky.

I am unsure why you would ask for the number of days in the Islamic Calendar for the bonus; that could have been tweaked a little and made it less of a "can you guess the right number in the 350s" game. Similarly, a tossup on "Draco" seems like a really weird answer choice - does it really merit a whole tossup by itself? or would it be better off as a bonus in a northern constellations bonus?
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Post by Broad-tailed Grassbird »

Round 1: bonus on baseball stadiums renames (U.S. Cellular, Progressive, Rogers)
Everyone at UIC probably passed New Comiskey on the way to the tournament, this happened at ACF Fall as well with the Robie House.

Round 3: tu Carl Edwards
bonuses on The Waste Land (Eliot, chess, Buddha); former cast of Mad TV (LaMarr, Sullivan, Herman); Kara DioGuardi (American Idol, Enrique Iglesias, Ashlee Simpson)
Round 3 was good to you, minus the MadTV bonus. I still have no clue who those people are.

Round 5: bonus on House Ways and Means (Rangel, Michigan, Cantor)
Word to Michigan.


Round 6: bonus on Sinbad the Sailor (roc, Sri Lanka, elephant)
I felt like we guessed on these and still got them all.


Round 8: tus on football Harrisons
A football question that I thought was going to go cross-disciplinary. I just didn't like it, even though I was probably the only one in the room who would get it


Bob Stoops
Too many coaches come out of Kansas, which made this tossup very hard to power, but still overall good, even though it felt like it was written out of wikipedia.
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Post by grapesmoker »

Tossups on constellations suck as a rule and this one was no different. I basically powered that tossup because I knew Ladon was a dragon, so I was like, what constellation might that be?
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Post by Mechanical Beasts »

Yeah; the only way that a tossup on a constellation could be good hypothetically is if it is an author tossup analogue: i.e. several astronomically interesting DSOs occur in that constellation but they're too hard to toss up on their own/ there's some reason why you're not just tossing up whatever class of DSO one or more of them is. I can't think, that said, of a time when that actually has happened. I guess Orion has cool shit in it and stuff.
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Post by Captain Sinico »

nalin wrote:Round 1: bonus on baseball stadiums renames (U.S. Cellular, Progressive, Rogers)
Everyone at UIC probably passed New Comiskey on the way to the tournament, this happened at ACF Fall as well with the Robie House.

Round 3: tu Carl Edwards
bonuses on The Waste Land (Eliot, chess, Buddha); former cast of Mad TV (LaMarr, Sullivan, Herman); Kara DioGuardi (American Idol, Enrique Iglesias, Ashlee Simpson)
Round 3 was good to you, minus the MadTV bonus. I still have no clue who those people are.

Round 5: bonus on House Ways and Means (Rangel, Michigan, Cantor)
Word to Michigan.


Round 6: bonus on Sinbad the Sailor (roc, Sri Lanka, elephant)
I felt like we guessed on these and still got them all.


Round 8: tus on football Harrisons
A football question that I thought was going to go cross-disciplinary. I just didn't like it, even though I was probably the only one in the room who would get it


Bob Stoops
Too many coaches come out of Kansas, which made this tossup very hard to power, but still overall good, even though it felt like it was written out of wikipedia.
What on earth are you yammering about?! Go learn something before you try to talk about questions.

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Post by tiwonge »

cvdwightw wrote:
Ringil wrote:
Old Man of the Mountain wrote:We didn't get to play on it, but how in the world is a bonus on chess players a good idea? I get that Kasparov is gettable, but who else other than Fischer at this level? Maybe as a screw you hard part Spassky, but that's it.

Jeff, what category was this put in?
Anand is pretty well known being the world champion at the moment. Also, Carlsen has been in the news lately for being really really young and for having a really high rating (he was even on the front page of Wikipedia!). I don't think that bonus is that impossible.
It's certainly not impossible, but it's not like Anand or Carlsen is an actual middle-difficulty part of that bonus (as in convertible by half the teams playing). This bonus has like 1 easy and 2 hard parts of relatively equal difficulty. (On the other hand, there is the very-real issue of who is actually a decent middle part in terms of chess players.)
In my opinion,
Easy chess players: Kasparov, Fischer, Deep Blue
Moderate chess players: Karpov, Spassky, Anand, Deep Fritz, Fritz (and maybe other chess engines?)
Hard: just about anybody else, including Capablanca, Tal, Staunton (mostly for having set of chess pieces named for him), Alekhine, Judit Polgar, Morphy

Then again, I'm not exactly sure how one would ask questions about the hard ones. Years holding the FIDE chess title aren't interesting. Notable games, maybe? Staunton and Polgar are probably askable. I haven't heard of Carlsen, but I haven't been following chess for the last several years. If we're to judge difficulty by familiarity with the subject, I'd say that somebody with some knowledge of chess/chess history (people who are more than just a casual player) probably would know those middle players.
Colin McNamara, Boise State University
Member, PACE
Idaho Quiz & Academic Teams
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