ERIS - MS set available for mirrors for the 2020-21 season

Dormant threads from the middle school section are preserved here.
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CPiGuy
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ERIS - MS set available for mirrors for the 2020-21 season

Post by CPiGuy »

This is an announcement for ERIS (Early Release Introductory Set), a middle school / novice high school tournament set to be available for mirrors starting September 2020 through the end of the 2020-21 school year. The set is head-edited by me, Conor Thompson, and written by a large staff of current middle and high school students (see below). The set includes twelve packets of 20/20 tossups/bonuses, plus an additional 10/5 to be used as replacements. Tossups are powermarked, and bonuses follow the standard 10-points-each, three-parts-of-varying-difficulty standard.

Difficulty and length
The set is intended to be suitable for both middle school and novice high school audiences. The intended difficulty of the set is “no harder than the preliminary rounds of MSNCT (and very likely easier)”; as MSNCT’s preliminary rounds are used for high school novice tournaments, we feel this is appropriate for both audiences. As such, care is being taken to ensure that both tossup answerlines and bonus parts are accessible to brand-new quizbowl players. Tossups will be capped at 400 characters; this is approximately the average length of an NAQT IS-set tossup. Bonuses will not have a hard character cap, but bonus parts exceeding two lines will be rare if not nonexistent.

Distribution
The distribution will be as follows:
5/5 Science (including 1/1 non-computational math; there will be zero computational math)
4/4 History
3/3 Literature
1.5/1.5 Fine Arts
1.5/1.5 Geography
1.5/1.5 General Knowledge / Other Academic (including “mixed impure academic”)
1/1 Religion
1/1 Mythology
0.5/0.5 Philosophy and Social Science
0.5/0.5 Current Events
0.5/0.5 Popular Culture and Sports

The distribution differs somewhat from other housewritten sets; this is in part because it is intended to conform more closely to NAQT’s distribution and therefore serve as preparation for teams planning on attending MSNCT, and in part because I believe that this distribution will do a better job of enabling the set to be accessible to middle school and new high school players.

Writers
The following 27 people wrote for the set:
Evan Cui (Barrington HS, IL)
Ayush Dahal (Saraland HS, AL)
Yuti Das (James Clemens HS, AL)
Owen Farra (STL Patriots, MO)
Rohan Ganeshan (Buffalo Grove HS, IL)
Soren Gjesfjeld (Bloomington HS, IL)
Kaushik Gollamudi (Barrington HS, IL)
Em Gunter (Salem HS, VA)
Brodie Henry (West Point MS, AL)
Aadit Juneja (Adlai E. Stevenson HS, IL)
Nate Kang (St. Mary's Episcopal School, CA)
Michael Karpov (Barrington HS, IL)
Rohan Kher (Barrington HS, IL)
Jordan Lee (LAMP HS, AL)
Benjamin McAvoy-Bickford (East Chapel Hill HS, NC)
Vishal Rameshbabu (James Clemens HS, AL)
Josh Rubel (Greenhill School, TX)
Samir Sarma (Eden Prairie HS, MN)
Neil Sethi (James Clemens HS, AL)
Ameya Singh (Laurel Springs School, CA)
Colin Stewart (Barrington HS, IL)
Roxanne Tang (Barrington HS, IL)
Cade Tisdale (Saraland HS, AL)
Rohan Venkateswaran (U. California - Berkeley)
Ethan Xu (James Clemens HS, AL)
Charles Young (Barrington HS, IL)
Justin Zhang (Duke University, NC)

Fees
The mirror fee for ERIS is $10 per team, including house teams. This is the same for both middle school and high school mirrors. If you have specific financial circumstances (such as outreach to low-income schools) and would like to negotiate an exception to this fee, you are invited to contact me.

If you are planning on using the set for a non-standard format (for example, by having more than two teams play per match, or reading only the first two parts of bonuses, or by introducing housewritten lightning rounds or worksheets), you must clear this with me in advance of receiving the set.

Contact
If you would like to use ERIS for your tournament, or you have any other questions about the set, please contact me at [email protected]. We are open to having this set used by both traditional one-day tournaments and by leagues or conferences in need of a set.

Current list of mirrors
AQBL (national) -- September 12/13 (high school)
Ashtabula League, Portage League, Toledo League JV (Ohio) -- October and onwards (high school)
NJMAL (New Jersey) -- October and onwards (middle school)
College Heights Christian (Southwest Missouri) -- November 9th-13th (high school)
East Palestine HS (Ohio) -- November 14 (high school)
Pine Tree Classic (Maine) -- sometime in the fall semester (high school)
Ladue Fall Novice (Missouri) -- December 5 (high school)
Salem HS (Southwest Virginia) -- January (high school)
Last edited by CPiGuy on Fri Sep 18, 2020 1:15 pm, edited 3 times in total.
Conor Thompson (he/it)
Bangor High School '16
University of Michigan '20
Iowa State University '25
Tournament Format Database
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CPiGuy
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Joined: Wed Nov 16, 2016 8:19 pm
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Re: ERIS - MS set available for mirrors for the 2020-21 season

Post by CPiGuy »

The original post has been updated to include the final list of 27 writers and a list of mirrors.

There is currently only one middle school mirror of ERIS (in New Jersey) -- we'd love for this to increase; please contact me if you are interested in hosting a middle school tournament on our set!
Conor Thompson (he/it)
Bangor High School '16
University of Michigan '20
Iowa State University '25
Tournament Format Database
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