2013 MSNCT discussion

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2013 MSNCT discussion

Post by Important Bird Area »

This is your thread for question-specific discussion of the 2013 NAQT MSNCT.

Note: a handful of high school novice tournaments in 2012-13 used the 2012 MSNCT as their question set. It is possible that some fall 2013 events may use this year's MSNCT in similar fashion. High school players, please check this page (under "2012-2013 Middle School Championship") before reading this thread.
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Re: 2013 MSNCT discussion

Post by Cody »

bt_green_warbler wrote:Note: a handful of high school novice tournaments in 2012-13 used the 2012 MSNCT as their question set. It is possible that some fall 2013 events may use this year's MSNCT in similar fashion. High school players, please check this page (under "2012-2013 Middle School Championship") before reading this thread.
As it turns out, no fall event is currently using this, but have we really learned nothing from the [recent] past? Even if we are talking novice events..
Cody Voight, VCU ’14.
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Re: 2013 MSNCT discussion

Post by Important Bird Area »

Given that 1) we do not yet have any subsequent tournaments planned to use the 2013 MSNCT and 2) past tournaments using the previous year's MSNCT have generally been novice events for which few or no players read this forum, R. and I both agreed that it was ok to have a public thread.

Any potential hosts who inquire about using the 2013 MSNCT will be made aware that this thread exists.
Jeff Hoppes
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Re: 2013 MSNCT discussion

Post by Sen. Estes Kefauver (D-TN) »

The only discussions to be had here are "Why is NAQT, the company that is still reeling from the biggest quizbowl cheating scandal, which included a high schooler, giving high schoolers carte blanche to cheat at tournaments by having a public thread about, especially when they can just make a subforum for discussion?" and "Why is a middle school tournament in the spring available for high schools to play in the fall?"
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Re: 2013 MSNCT discussion

Post by setht »

Regardless of what may happen this fall, this set is definitely open for discussion, and we're hoping there will be some. Possibly all the competitors and coaches were fine with everything in the set and have no comments, or perhaps everyone is busy with other stuff, but we really would like to hear more from people.

I'll start things off by commenting on an earth science tossup I wrote on shields, with clues on continental shields and on shield volcanoes. This one got low conversion (20/39 rooms answered it correctly), which isn't great; more distressingly, it got a ton of negs. I'm guessing a lot of these were people buzzing in with "volcanoes." In my room, that was the first buzz, and I gave a neg without prompting. I've heard that in other rooms "volcanoes" got a prompt; obviously I don't think this was the right thing to do, but I apologize for not thinking to put an explicit "do not prompt" clause in the answer line to help make sure that all rooms dealt with the tossup in the same manner (and I can see why other moderators would have prompted on "volcanoes" in the absence of explicit prompt/do not prompt instructions, since "shield volcanoes" was listed as an acceptable alternate answer [as was "continental shields"]).

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Re: 2013 MSNCT discussion

Post by High Dependency Unit »

You actually answered the one question I had on this set. I negged it with volcanoes.
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Re: 2013 MSNCT discussion

Post by Dirty Water »

geolawyerman wrote:You actually answered the one question I had on this set. I negged it with volcanoes.
Ditto.
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Re: 2013 MSNCT discussion

Post by Eddie »

I wrote the tossup on _mammal_s, which, despite being answered correctly by 31/34 of rooms, was also negged by 17 teams. I'm guessing a lot of these negs were buzzes on things such as "primates" or "chordates" or some other classification either too specific or not specific enough. I'd like some feedback on this question, as it was the first taxonomy-type question I've written.
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Re: 2013 MSNCT discussion

Post by Dirty Water »

The _Mammalia_ or _mammal_s tossup started off with "This class's members", so any neg with a classification too specific or not specific enough was not the question's fault.
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Re: 2013 MSNCT discussion

Post by Eddie »

KoreanTacos wrote:The _Mammalia_ or _mammal_s tossup started off with "This class's members", so any neg with a classification too specific or not specific enough was not the question's fault.
I guess what I meant to say was that a lot of negs probably came from middle schoolers who didn't know the difference between a taxonomic class, order, phylum, etc.
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