[2010] Thanks and general discussion thread

[theMoMA]

Thanks for playing the tournament! Hopefully it was an enjoyable experience. I want to sincerely thank the twenty host sites and my fourteen collaborators for their integral part in making this tournament happen. Additionally, this tournament would have been significantly less polished without the assistance of Matt Weiner, Jerry Vinokurov, Rob Carson, Trevor Davis, Susan Ferrari, Trygve Meade, Mehdi Razvi, Bernadette Spencer, Joe Hansen, Carsten Gehring, Matt Lafer, Gautam Kandlikar, and many others (sorry if I forgot you!).

This thread is a good place to post general observations about the set. I might also create some other threads that have more directed discussion topics. You're all free to create threads to address specific topics, as well.

Just a bit on our writing process, which may be helpful in understanding how the tournament set came to be. Various Minnesota-based college quizbowlers helped me pick out all of the answers, which I then assigned to the writers based on the categories they requested. I got the questions back and edited them, occasionally enlisting the help of experts in various fields (Jerry, Rob, and Gautam, especially). The next step was playtesting the questions and making editorial and grammatical changes based on that. Finally, I enlisted the help of five proofreaders to give the questions a final look-over. The writers will likely be able to answers some of your questions about the clues that they used, but the ultimate editing decisions were mine, so if you didn't like something, you know who to point the finger at.

If you noticed an error in a question (grammatical, factual, spelling, or otherwise), I'd love to know in order to make the set better for future sites. You can email me at [email protected] with any of those observations, or for any other reason.

Thanks again for playing the set, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts about the questions!

[jdeliverer]

Thanks to all involved in creating this set. My first impression was that it was very well-written; tossups were on the whole very pyramidal and had a lot of interesting clues. The difficulty of the tossups seemed appropriately challenging on the leadins while maintaining a very accessible answer space. The bonuses seemed overall a bit easier than the tossups - our site had high conversion across the field, and there were many times that even people who had little experience with quiz bowl were surprised with some of the easier 30's.

I think everyone had a lot of fun playing this, and it was a really nice way to get started playing college quiz bowl. Once I actually get a copy of the questions I may post more question or cateogry-specific discussion or examples.

[theMoMA]

My policy on giving out the set is this: Anyone who played the tournament can get the packets from me (in electronic form). If you didn't play the tournament, but the site/s in your region have already concluded, I'll give you the packets. I won't tolerate packets changing hands without my consent, so talk to me before you send them to anyone else. I've come up with a way to trace back the originator of underground packet exchanges, and I will resort to public shaming if it comes to that.

Email me at [email protected] if you want the packets.

[MicroEStudent]

I have to say that this was a fine novice level set. For first time players, the content was at a good level. Prelim tossup conversion at the RIT site was 87% and it was 91.7% in the playoffs.

Some teams in my room griped about their perceived difficulty of certain literature bonus questions regarding books/authors that were read in high school versus an introductory freshmen English class. I think the complaints were of the vein of having *easy novel* being paired with *author of easy novel* in a bonus.

Speaking from our club, we had three brand new players and one player that only had one tournament's experience at this tournament and all enjoyed their time today and answered some questions. I conducted practices by using Delta Burke questions to get ready for this tournament, and I found the difficulty to be similar, and the answer selection was somewhat similar as well.

[theMoMA]

It's possible that we will have a delayed mirror of this tournament on 10/30 at LSU. Final release of the packets is pending the outcome of those negotiations.

[theMoMA]

Some of the LSU teams have already played the tournament, so I'm releasing the packets and will be opening this for public discussion shortly.

[AKKOLADE]

This forum should be open to the public now!