2021 ACF Regionals - General Discussion & Thanks

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jaimiec
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2021 ACF Regionals - General Discussion & Thanks

Post by jaimiec »

2021 ACF Regionals - General Discussion and Thanks

This is the thread for general discussion about 2021 ACF Regionals. Please leave all general comments about set content here.

The goal was to have a challenging Regionals that balanced introducing new & creative content with an enjoyable gameplay experience for everyone. I hope that we succeeded in that, and I hope that every player had at least one "wow, I knew that!" moment that improved their day.

I want to thank every single editor for their contributions.

Tim, the volume of questions you wrote was incredible, and they were all great fun. Thanks for doing so much to keep the lit organized, on track, and well balanced, and for providing feedback on all my questions. Your math, film, and trash questions were also fantastic!
Michael, your ancient world knowledge is amazingly deep. The cool anecdotes and detailed historigraphy in your questions were fascinating. Thank you also for keeping the lit well-balanced too and checking my declensions.
Jonathan, thanks for the history and CS material!
Hari, your questions were wonderful! I loved the creativity, and the ability to ask about all different areas of social, military, and political history.
Hasna, your bio questions were great, and your social sciences and religion questions always found new and creative topics to ask about. When I can say that I learned a new perspective on the world just from reading a quizbowl question, I think that's a success.
Stephen, your science questions were great as always! You were great at finding the best in each submission and polishing them to be clear, well-calibrated, and fun. Thank you also for reminding me about numerous organizational things which I was pretty new to for a packet submission tournament.
Natan, your science and music were great! As a person who knows nothing whatsoever about music, I would still read all your questions and think "hey, that sounds cool."
Nick, your Christianity and Judaism questions were super detailed and clear. They brought so many more interesting philosophies and controversies to the set than the "name a Biblical book" content that I would have written.
Annabelle, your arts, myth, and religion questions were the best I have ever seen. Every day, I would log on and find another of your questions and say "No, THAT's my new favorite commonlink."
Jordan, your philosophy was wonderful. It kept within a reasonable difficulty while having a totally different set of answerlines (gods, numbers of people), which can be so hard to do.
Nitin, your geography and CE were very solid, and incredibly fun.

As I'm writing this, I'm absolutely running out of (sort of) professional ways to say "your questions were great" - because I truly have this to say to every editor. Thanks so much to all of you - your hard work and creativity blew me away, and you put an incredible amount of love into this set despite classes, jobs, finals (and by the way, a pandemic!)

Thank you to all our playtesters - you helped calibrate the set and make it so much better.

Thanks to Ophir Lifshitz, who put so much work into proofreading, pronunciation guides, and set organization, without which the set would have been much less polished.

Thanks to Olivia Murton, who organized spreadsheets and kept proofreading and everything running. Thanks to Jon Suh for proofreading and some on-the-spot religion feedback!

Thanks to Margaret Tebbe for coordinating between sites, and figuring out the smoothest ways for everything to run.

Thanks to Jacob Reed, who set up all the infrastructure for this tournament to be a success.

Thanks to Matt Bollinger, for helping me through my first time head editing an ACF tournament, for checking on difficulty control, and just providing lots of mentorship through this process.

Thanks to all the tournament hosts, for keeping everything running smoothly online. And thanks to all the teams for playing! We hope you had fun.

Whew! That was a lot. Please leave comments below!
Jaimie Carlson
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - General Discussion & Thanks

Post by naan/steak-holding toll »

I think this set's quality was similar to last year's (solid, many very creative questions) but the feel was distinct. Tossups seemed about the same in difficulty with a bit less inter-category difficulty variance than last year. Bonuses, on the other hand, seemed quite different. The middle parts of bonuses were definitely easier, and I am to understand this was intentional, so the editors did great work there. Middle parts are probably the most important differentiating factor on bonuses for about 80% of teams in the field, so the focus on easing up here was wise. I think the average hard part was also easier, but there was a bit more variance than last year in terms of the level of knowledge asked for a hard part, ranging from basic upper canon knowledge to clearly important but often very challenging hard parts. This felt pretty noticeable at the supersite, so I'm curious if this is borne out by data.

This comment is not meant to the exclusion of other editors, but I wanted to praise Annabelle and Hasna specifically - I found the myth, religion, and painting questions to be uniformly very enjoyable and well-gradated, showing exceptional talent from newer collegiate editors.
Last edited by naan/steak-holding toll on Mon Feb 01, 2021 10:28 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - General Discussion & Thanks

Post by nickdai »

I hope this is the right place to do this, but I really want to thank Jaimie for being such a great head editor! I’ve never edited a non-novice college set before, but Jaimie and all the other editors made sure I felt included and greatly helped me with finding resources and editing questions. I know how much time you spent in the last 2 weeks proofreading and fixing all my mistakes, and I really appreciate all of that! Also wanted to show my appreciation to the other subject editors and proofreaders for putting up with me and helping me improve my writing and editing! This was a great experience and thank you all so much!
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - General Discussion & Thanks

Post by Smuttynose Island »

This was a very well done set. I largely agree with Will's assessment that the TU difficulty felt in-line with the other "nats qualifier" Regionals, while the bonus middle parts felt much easier than last year's. If the data exists, I'd be willing to look into verifying this.

More generally, I want to applaud the editors of Winter and Regionals for really sticking to their advertised difficulty. It's hard! But it made both Winter and Regionals very enjoyable!
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - General Discussion & Thanks

Post by Sam »

This was a great set. The answer lines were all very playable. I have a terrible memory for tournaments, but I think not that long ago hearing "Description acceptable" elicited groans, as people steeled themselves for a morass of prompts and guesswork. There was virtually none of that here, while still including plenty of "creative" answer lines and topics.*

My impression of bonus variability is the same as Will Alston's. I'm not sure this is bad or not. As long as there aren't large differences between categories, we accept tossup variability as a fact of life--possibly even good in its own right, as a way to "keep people honest" and include some fun experimental stuff. I admit it's more dispiriting when being trounced to finally answer a tossup and then get the hardest bonus in the packet, but that should be a tail event, by design (and just as likely as getting an easy 30).

* Part of this may a change in player attitude and ability, as we've gotten more comfortable with what kinds of things can be asked. In the grand tradition of academic writing, I will suggest the truth is somewhere in between. It's also nuanced somehow.
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - General Discussion & Thanks

Post by t-bar »

I want to thank some people who helped in producing my categories and reflect on some goals I had as an editor. In addition, I'd be happy to provide feedback to any team on their submissions in my categories. Just send me an email at the address in my profile!

I edited chemistry, physics, and astronomy. Hasna gave me valuable advice on biochemistry and organic chemistry, while Hari and Jaimie provided input on electrical engineering, with other editors serving as sounding boards for question concepts. Ophir Lifshitz, Chris Manners, Rohith Nagari, Kai Smith, and Kevin Wang playtested some or all of my questions and gave valuable feedback. Kevin in particular provided consistently constructive suggestions for a lot of my weaker questions; if you can get him to lend his time to your set, it will get better. Any factual errors or miscalibrations in difficulty, of course, are on me.

Some of my priorities included:
  • Producing easier questions than the physics and other science I edited in 2018, which were systematically too hard. In particular, I tried consistently to imagine specific categories of non-experts who could buzz on the 4th and 5th lines of tossups and convert medium parts. My loose impression is that I largely succeeded in the first goal and largely failed in the second. While I saw lots of buzzes on middle-late clues, most medium and hard parts and some easy parts were too difficult for their intended conversion rates.
  • Using questions submitted by a wide variety of teams. I set myself an informal goal of featuring 40 teams among the 63 questions I was responsible for in the team-submitted packets, and I wound up drawing from 42 submissions (44 including tiebreakers).
  • Emphasizing contributions by women and minority scientists where possible, both in contemporary and historical work. To the former end, you got clues about Susan Solomon, Melba Phillips, Ana Aguiar (from a great submission by UVA A!), Patricia Watson, JoAnne Stubbe, Christiane Dietrich-Buchecker, Katie Bouman, and Andrea Ghez. I don't think I was as successful explicitly cluing contributions by BIPOC.
  • Covering a diverse and interesting array of content on its own terms. There was a healthy amount of engineering/applied content in both the physics and the chemistry, as well as clues on computational techniques where appropriate. I tried not to load up too much on any one subdistribution, or on clues that you would only encounter in upper-division classes. While I hope the deliberate emphasis on variety was engaging and informative for players, I suspect it may also have contributed to driving the difficulty up.
Brown A, MIT B, and Purdue A turned in absolutely A+ work all across my categories. I was also very impressed by the overall submissions from Claremont Colleges A, Colorado A, Edinburgh A, Harvard B, Illinois B, Northwestern A, Southampton A, Toronto A, UNC A, UVA A, Vanderbilt B, Warwick A, and WUSTL A, as well many of the usual suspects and other teams I'm sure I've overlooked. It's very heartening to see how many capable science writers there are all over the quizbowl community. I've listed some great specific submissions in the other thread.
Last edited by t-bar on Tue Feb 02, 2021 5:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - General Discussion & Thanks

Post by knife emoji »

Since Annabelle and I decided we wanted to apply to edit Regionals together and essentially worked together on many of our questions, we thought it’d be fitting to make a joint post with our thanks and thoughts. We want to give a huge thank you to Jaimie for doing an incredible job captaining the massive undertaking that is Regionals, and to the rest of the editing team for being such a wonderful, supportive group to work with, especially for our first time working on a set of this level.

From Hasna: Thanks to all the playtesters and last-minute reviewers for their help; every bit of it improved the quality of my categories—any mistakes in them are mine alone. For biology, I want to thank, in particular, Shan Kothari and Rohith Nagari for being generous with their feedback and their time. As for social science, I want to thank all the editors for their many rounds of input, and particularly Jordan, whose suggestions were often the difference between a half-baked monstrosity of a question and an interesting one. I also want to thank Olivia for writing some brilliant linguistics. For religion, I owe Annabelle a huge thanks for letting me talk at her daily about Sufis and bhajans and everything else I enjoy.

In my biology writing, I tried to draw on core content and use that as the basis for questions that hopefully even people who do not do biology would find interesting. I’ve tried to honor the work of women, and I also want to thank Stephen for doing the same in his editing—he never mentioned it to me as a priority, but his conscious effort to do so showed every time he shared a new question with the editors and it was such a joy to see.

In social science, I hoped to do the same, and beyond that, I hope that even one of the questions made someone look at the world in a new way or recognize in it something they didn’t see before. I’ve found social sciences to be most meaningful to me where they’ve given me language to describe things that I’ve noticed but haven’t quite had the words to grasp, and I hope I translated that sense into the social science distribution I put together (with Jaimie, who did the econ, for which I am deeply grateful).

And religion: in my Islam writing, I tried to emphasize traditions and themes that I think are often lost in the canonical set of things quizbowl tends to ask about Islam, but that feel important to me as a Muslim. In my work on Hinduism/Sikhism/Jainism, I similarly tried to write about things people might have seen and done (and maybe even sung), and I hope those questions felt true to at least some of the experiences of people more familiar with those traditions than I am. Where I drew from texts, I wanted to emphasize the heterogeneity of the traditions throughout the subcontinent.

From Annabelle: Many thanks to all the editors and playtesters for their input - the distributions I edited have certainly benefited from it. I’d like to thank in particular everyone who helped me balance an interesting (at least, I hope) myth distribution with one that was reasonable at this difficulty level: Matt and Jaimie for patiently going back and forth with me in the comments, and also Jordan, JinAh, and Jon for their very helpful suggestions. Thanks to Michael for working with me to tighten up the classical myth, and especially for his help on the black skin in myth tossup. Another big thanks to Hari and especially Jaimie as well for their really fun contributions to the painting/sculpture distribution, and their suggestions throughout editing. Props to Nick for helping us keep track of balance in the religion distribution and working on cool questions like ancestor veneration outside of the Judeo-Christian religions. And finally, I need to thank Hasna for brainstorming questions with me and letting me rant about all manner of things.

My knowledge of painting/sculpture comes from museum visits and generally just enjoying art rather than formally studying it: so, in editing the subject, I hope I have managed to highlight things that are fun to look at and think about. I have certainly also tried to then engage beyond the visual aspects, including with our interpretations of art and the process of creating it.

For mythology, I really tried to give weight to cultures that don’t come up as often / shift the heavy focus that classical myth typically receives: I hope people enjoyed hearing new stories. I edited Buddhism and the Afro-Atlantic religions for this set, where my aim was to give more depth to their representation. For example, I hope that the New Religious Movements bonus (my one non-Buddhist East Asian contribution) was able to highlight a little more on their context than the usual Aum Shinrikyo content. Especially for Vodou, I also wanted to emphasize that beyond memorizing pantheons in a more “mythology-esque” treatment, there are crucial practices like drumming/dancing and possession that characterize it. In general, across my categories, I hope I have also managed to highlight diverse perspectives. I was especially proud of the Milky Way / red / Fujian bonus in myth in this regard - in addition to making a conscious effort to be more inclusive in our writing, I hope it is also possible to represent a wider swathe of the continuum across behaviors as universal as searching for love in a single bonus.
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - General Discussion & Thanks

Post by The Sawing-Off of Manhattan Island »

I think this tournament did a great job of hitting a really reasonable difficulty for the regionals difficulty slot, and I hope future regs level tournaments trend towards this difficulty. There were a lot of fun ideas that you can't pull off at easier difficulties, while not being punishing at all (A lot of the painting/sculpture especially fell into this boundary, I think - the category as a whole was fantastic and very fun to play.)

going to wantonly mention answerlines from packets below because I don't remember which rounds these were, sorry!

The flip side to the coin, which was definitely exacerbated by the invitational site in general, was that questions felt pretty cliffy at times; I think I noticed this most in lit, though of course every set/category will have questions that cliff. At risk of getting too much into specific q discussion, two questions that stood out especially to me, probably because they were early packets, were the tus on Cather and Mistral. With the former, I thought the sentence giving away Paul's Case could have used more context, since the sentence felt like it was only buzzable at the words "usher at Carnegie Hall," which will be a buzz point for a lot of teams. With Mistral, I think the phrase "Occitan poet" was dropped before the name of his poem, which felt like it violated internal pyrimidality. I think a couple other questions we played had similar issues; Steinbeck at Doc's name e.g. cliffed p hard and led to a huge buzzer race in our room. This is probably really nitpicky, and again these issues are pretty specific to my experience, but I do think its worth noting since I think Regs is usually intended to meaningfully separate top teams, and on those questions at least it felt like that goal was less possible. Anyways, this is a really long paragraph on an overall pretty small issue that was magnified by the unique nature of the invitation site, so hopefully that signals that overall I thought this set was really well done.

I was a big fan of the CS (and science more generally) at this tournament; it was all well-clued and relevant and reflects how much quizbowl has improved at writing CS recently, and the science in general had a lot of spicy ideas that were self-evidently important, in line with my comment above about this set making efficient use of its difficulty level.
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Re: 2021 ACF Regionals - General Discussion & Thanks

Post by Jem Casey »

I had a blast editing the philosophy for this set, in large part thanks to Jaimie and my co-editors being such a delightful team to work with; thank you all!

I also enjoyed reading all of your submitted questions. This is by no means a complete list of the quality material we received, but the philosophy questions from MIT B, Princeton A, Stanford A, UC Davis, Warwick A, Waterloo B, and WUSTL A stood out as highlights, and teams such as Cambridge A, Chicagos A-C, Rice A, and Maryland A submitted strong material that I was unfortunately unable to find room for, but still greatly appreciated. If you or your teammates would like feedback on your submissions (particularly in philosophy, but also happy to give more general pointers or comment on any other non-science questions), please shoot me a message at my gmail address (jordanzbrownstein), or via forums pms/discord/FB messenger. Looking forward to hearing from you!
Jordan Brownstein
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