That was part of our post-mortem analysis as well: much lit appears at NCT not because someone thought it would make a great NCT question, but because it was a submitted question that was clearly too hard for an IS set and not hard enough for SCT, so NCT ends up scooping up a lot of these "Twilight Zone" questions. (Rising difficulty at SCT lately, to stay commensurate with circuit events, has widened this gulf.) The end result is too many answer choices that aren't ideal for many high schoolers. Of course, given the caliber of a lot of the NCT players who post here, this audience may not have as many difficulty complaints as the attendees as a whole. Anecdotally, lit conversion didn't look too anemic to me, certainly not in the playoff rounds.Cheynem wrote:My kneejerk answer on lit, mainly the American lit, is that a lot of it was too hard
Well, no, these are all clearly non-academic. I like this kind of stuff too, and as I was moderating I still felt like it was coming up disproportionately. (Disproportionate to what it will be next year, certainly, when there will be a hard, software-enforced cap.)or too borderline academic. A bonus on individual Herman Wouk novels is completely unacceptable on a high school level. I'm now going to play my elitist card again and also sneer that Ellis Peters, Dick Francis, Nero Wolfe, Roger Zelazny, Douglas Adams, James Bond books, the Master and Commander series, and any number of works I'm forgetting are very very loosely academic at best.
Pound (the only question at NCT to include the word "bitch"!):
This man wrote "And I love to see the sun rise blood-crimson" in a poem spoken by Bertrans de Born, "Sestina: Altaforte," and he called Western civilization "an old bitch gone in the teeth" in "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley." The volume "Section: Rock-Drill" contains poems LXXXV to XCV of his (*) major work, which notably includes Chinese characters. For 10 points--name this author of the "Adams," "Italian," and "Pisan" ~Cantos~.
Boll:
This author told of three soldiers discussing war on a trip from Paris to Poland in ~The Train Was on Time~. Another of his novels tells of a housekeeper who shoots T\:otges after helping a bank robber escape. Fifteen years before ~The Lost Honour of (*) Katharina Blum~, he wrote about Nettlinger wanting to see Robert Faehmel in a novel that attacked Nazism. For 10 points--name this German author of ~Billiards at Half-Past Nine~.