2023 ACF Regionals (January 28, 2023) Global Announcement

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2023 ACF Regionals (January 28, 2023) Global Announcement

Post by Chimango Caracara »

This is the official announcement for the 2023 edition of ACF Regionals, which will be held on January 28, 2023. I, Nick Jensen, am the head editor. This year’s subject editing team comprises:
-Alexandra Hardwick (European Literature, World Literature, Linguistics)
-Nick Jensen (Biology, Religion, Mythology, Geography/Current Events/Other Academic/Pop Culture)
-Rahul Keyal (American Literature, Painting/Sculpture)
-Allan Lee (American History, World History)
-Tim Morrison (British Literature, Philosophy, Math)
-Kevin Park (Other Fine Arts minus Opera)
-Grant Peet (European History, Other History)
-Graham Reid (Chemistry, Physics, Other Science minus Math)
-Chris Sims (Classical Music, Opera, Social Science minus Linguistics)

Format

We hope that ACF Regionals can be held in person wherever possible. However, given the continued uncertainty regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, we will reprise last year’s policies and allow ACF Regionals to be held online. Once again, online mirrors of ACF Regionals will operate as full qualifiers for 2023 ACF Nationals, functioning identically to in-person sites. Details on ACF's Nationals qualification policy from last year are available here for reference.

Sites and Hosting

If your school would like to host a mirror of ACF Regionals, please submit a bid to host here. We are looking for hosts in the regions listed in the “Hosts” section below. If you have questions about hosting, please email ACF’s Site Coordinator, John Nienajadlo, at [email protected] and CC [email protected]. Hosts must abide by ACF’s Hosting Guidelines.

Hosts:
Northeast: Yale
Upstate NY: Cornell
Upper Mid-Atlantic: Rutgers
Lower Mid-Atlantic: VCU
Southeast: Vanderbilt
Florida: Florida
Great Lakes: Wayne State
Midwest: Northwestern
North: Minnesota
South Central: Texas (UT Austin)
California: Claremont Colleges
Northwest: UBC
Eastern Canada: McGill
UK: Imperial College London

Registration

Main registration form: https://forms.gle/JWsmVeoXZgZUVbmr9

Fields form: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

Staff registration form: https://forms.gle/bDLQ1o2aRVzSP9sk6

Packet Submission

Any team that includes at least two people who played a regular, collegiate, academic quizbowl tournament* (either as a college student or as a high school student) prior to September 1, 2021 is required to submit a half-packet. If you are unsure whether your team is required to submit a half-packet, please email [email protected]. A team that is not required to submit a half-packet may submit an optional half-packet by the no-penalty deadline for a -$50 discount.

* For these purposes, all ACF tournaments, NAQT SCT (Division I or Division II), NAQT ICT, and typical college-level academic invitationals count as regular, collegiate, academic tournaments. Pop culture or “hybrid” tournaments, HCASC, and tournaments played on NAQT’s Collegiate Novice series sets do not.

If your team is obligated to submit a half-packet or wishes to submit an optional one, please email [email protected] by January 2, 2023 at the very latest to receive a half-packet distribution. Emailing to request a half-packet does not constitute registration for ACF Regionals; please be sure to also register with the official form.

In order to minimize the number of submissions that cannot be used for distributional reasons, half-packet assignments may ask for questions from specific subcategories. For instance, instead of being assigned an “American Literature” tossup, you might be asked to write a question on 20th-century American poetry, or a bonus on economics instead of “Social Science.”

Here is the half-packet submission schedule. All deadlines are 11:59 PM Pacific time.

October 30, 2022: -$75 discount
November 13, 2022: -$50 discount
November 27, 2022: -$25 discount
December 11, 2022: No discount given
January 2, 2023: +$25 penalty
January 8, 2023, +$50 penalty

After January 8, 2023, teams that submit late packets will be required to pay an additional $10 per day after the deadline. Teams that have not submitted a packet by January 16, 2023 will be dropped from the tournament, with no exceptions. Half-packets will be listed below as they are received.

October 30, 2022:
CWRU A
Harvard A
Toronto B

November 13, 2022:
Berkeley A
Cornell A
Cornell B
Indiana A
Maryland B
McMaster
Minnesota A
Minnesota B
OSU A
South Carolina A
UBC A
UNC A
UVA B
Virginia A
Warwick A
Washington A
Washington B

November 27, 2022:
Georgia Tech A
Georgia Tech D
Imperial A
MIT A
Ottawa A+Ottawa B
Oxford A
Oxford B
Oxford C
Purdue A
Toronto A
UCLA A
Waterloo A

December 11, 2022:
Berkeley B
Brandeis A
Cambridge A
Cambridge B
Durham A
Florida B
Georgia Tech B
GWU A
Imperial B
Kentucky A
Kenyon A
Liberty A
Michigan A
Mississippi State
Sheffield A
Texas A&M A
Western A

January 2, 2023:
Chicago A
Columbia B
Duke A
Duke B
Edinburgh
Georgia Tech C
Harvard B
Houston
Northwestern
OSU B
Princeton
Stanford A
Swarthmore A
Tennessee

January 8, 2023:
Bristol A (+1 day)
Brown A
Chicago B
Chicago C (+1 day)
Columbia A
Gettysburg
Iowa A (+2 days)
Iowa State (+1 day)
JMU A
John Jay (+3 days)
Maryland A
Minnesota C (+1 day)
Notre Dame A
NYU A (+1 day)
Oklahoma A
Oklahoma B
RIT (+1 day)
Toronto C
WUSTL A

Submission discounts and penalties—but not deadlines—may differ for teams attending sites outside of the United States. Please consult the announcement posts for such sites for details.

In order to meet a deadline, you must submit your half-packet to [email protected] by 11:59 PM Pacific time in Microsoft Word .doc or .docx format. Please do not submit packets as pdfs. The email subject line should list the name of the school, the team letter (if applicable), and the words “half-packet.”

If a team wishes to outsource part of its packet to a player who is not expected to play on that team (e.g. a student who has graduated), it must first receive approval from the head editor at [email protected]. Teams should email in their submissions separately and may not collaborate on packets; i.e. a school’s A team and B team should not write two half-packets together and should remain blind to one another’s packets. However, if anyone who works on a packet or has access to that packet ends up playing on a different team (e.g. if someone originally intended to be on a school’s B team instead plays for the A team) please inform the head editor and your site’s TD as soon as possible.

Fees

Fees and discounts for this tournament, other than packet submission discounts, are structured as follows:

Base fee per team: $150
New-to-quizbowl discount: -$100
Shorthanded discount (1-2 players): -$75
Staffers: -$25 per staffer with a functional laptop. Staffers must register with ACF in advance with this form and affirm that they have completed ACF’s moderator training. Staffers who have not completed the training may scorekeep.
Buzzer discount (per buzzer): -$10
Travel discount (per 200 miles traveled one-way): -$10

The new-to-quizbowl discount is intended for schools that did not send a team to any regular collegiate academic tournament (exclusively novice tournaments do not count) since September 2021, and which have no one on the team(s) claiming this discount who played those tournaments for another school.

Host sites will bill teams as soon as possible after the teams register. Teams should pay their host sites by whatever method is convenient for the hosts, who will in turn pay ACF by check, bank transfer, cash, or PayPal.

Distribution

The distribution for this tournament will follow the standard ACF distribution, as laid out here.

Please note that, for 2023 ACF Regionals, “Other History” includes ancient history (from the entire world, not just civilizations of the Mediterranean and environs) in addition to British/Irish/Commonwealth/cross-regional history. Teams are encouraged to submit ancient history and archaeology questions for this category, rather than write on Australia/Aotearoa New Zealand/Canada (which are historically overrepresented in submissions).

Question Guidelines

This tournament is intended to be similar in difficulty to 2022 ACF Regionals. While writing submissions, please keep in mind the following:

-In most cases, tossup answerlines should tend towards the easier and more accessible. Remember, Regionals is not Nationals. Please do not write tossups on answerlines that, in a Regionals bonus, would be medium or hard parts with giveaway-level clues (see below for more information on bonus difficulty). The majority of teams should be able to answer most tossups at the giveaway. You may write tossups with unconventional answerlines, but only if they are accessible. Please consult 2022 ACF Regionals for examples of the range of reasonable tossup answerlines.
-Tossups should be pyramidal, with harder clues preceding easier clues, both down the question as a whole and within individual sentences (“internal pyramidality”). However, early clues should still be buzzable by players who are very knowledgeable about the topic of the tossup. Please avoid writing clues that are so obscure that an expert in the relevant subject would be unable to buzz on them.
-For both tossups and bonuses, it’s often better to write on common answerlines with creative clues (e.g. an original theme) than an unusual answerline.
-Bonus easy parts should be gettable by around 90% of teams. 90% is not 100%; please do not write trivially easy bonus parts. However, easy parts should also be genuinely easy; avoid writing bonus parts that require teams to conjecture the correct answer by saying the most obvious thing (remember, players don’t know which part is the easy part). Be sure to provide concrete, widely known clues.
-Bonus medium parts should be gettable by around 50–60% of teams. Remember: that’s a lot of teams! Medium parts are usually not the place to expand the canon. Some decent, albeit imperfect, heuristics are that if something would be a pre-FTP clue in a Regionals tossup, or has come up about 50–75 times in past questions, it may be a good Regionals medium part with full information if it is significant (use your judgment). Topics that have come up more may also be good medium parts with partial information (“deeper clues”). Please consult 2022 Regionals for examples of medium part difficulty.
-Bonus hard parts should be challenging, but gettable by around 10–15% of teams. Appropriate hard parts will usually not be things that have never come up (or have only come up a couple times) in previous questions, unless there is good reason to suppose that they would be encountered organically by someone with a decent grounding in the subject (e.g. a staple topic in relevant undergraduate courses that, for whatever reason, hasn’t been asked about yet in quizbowl).
-Especially if you submit for a later deadline, broad questions that cross many time periods or genres (e.g. a common link literature tossup on cherries with clues from the Nico Walker novel, Sexing the Cherry, “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now,” and The Cherry Orchard or a painting bonus on giraffes with parts on Dalí, Bosch, and Piero di Cosimo) are less likely to be used than a question with a narrower scope (e.g. a bonus on the symbolism of birds in high Renaissance art) since the former have greater potential to overlap with existing questions (additionally, many editors philosophically prefer more cohesive themes).

Tossups will be capped at 800 characters and bonuses at 850 characters. However, you are free to write longer questions if you wish. Please do not write questions that are significantly shorter than the target length (i.e. tossups that are shorter than six lines or bonuses in which each part is only one line). Half-packets should be formatted in 10-point Times New Roman with one-inch margins. Please do not add extraneous spacing or paragraph breaks between question text and answerlines. For answerlines, please bold and underline minimum acceptable answers and include the most likely answer first. Include diacritics in foreign words if applicable. For example:

ANSWER: Panama [or Republic of Panama or República de Panamá]

More information can be found in ACF’s packet submission guidelines.

Submissions that flout the length, difficulty, or formatting guidelines, or which include unoriginal material (e.g. plagiarized text or recycled questions from a previous set), will be sent back to teams and will be considered unsubmitted for the purposes of packet discounts.

If you would like to request an extension for your deadline, or if you have any further questions, please email [email protected].
Last edited by Chimango Caracara on Wed Jan 11, 2023 10:21 pm, edited 67 times in total.
Nick Jensen
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Re: 2023 ACF Regionals (January 28, 2023) Global Announcement

Post by aidantf »

When are hosting bids due?
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Re: 2023 ACF Regionals (January 28, 2023) Global Announcement

Post by Chimango Caracara »

aidantf wrote: Tue Oct 04, 2022 9:46 pm When are hosting bids due?
November 27; I added this information to the original post.
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Re: 2023 ACF Regionals (January 28, 2023) Global Announcement

Post by Chimango Caracara »

This is a reminder that October 30 (one week from tomorrow) is the deadline to submit a half-packet for the all-new discount of -$75! We would love to see some early submissions.
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Re: 2023 ACF Regionals (January 28, 2023) Global Announcement

Post by alexdolin99 »

If you don't know the hosts, whom do you send the half packets to? (Ole Miss will likely go to the Southeast event).
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Re: 2023 ACF Regionals (January 28, 2023) Global Announcement

Post by kearnm7 »

alexdolin99 wrote: Fri Oct 28, 2022 6:43 pm If you don't know the hosts, whom do you send the half packets to? (Ole Miss will likely go to the Southeast event).
If you're submitting a packet, [email protected] is the place to send it. The editors will edit the questions, then send the finalized packets out to each finalized mirror site shortly before the tournament.
Michael Kearney
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ACF Site Coordinator, 2021 (Interim); ACF Nationals Assistant TD, 2021; ACF Nationals TD, 2022; ACF President, 2022-2023.
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Re: 2023 ACF Regionals (January 28, 2023) Global Announcement

Post by Chimango Caracara »

This is a reminder that the deadline to submit a half-packet for a -$50 discount is this Sunday!
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Re: 2023 ACF Regionals (January 28, 2023) Global Announcement

Post by Chimango Caracara »

The main post has been updated with hosts and registration forms for teams and staff.

ACF is still looking for a host in the UK; please email John Nienajadlo at [email protected] if you are interested!
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Re: 2023 ACF Regionals (January 28, 2023) Global Announcement

Post by Chimango Caracara »

This is a reminder that tomorrow is the last day to submit a packet for ACF Regionals without a penalty for late submission (or to receive a discount for an optional packet).
Nick Jensen
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Re: 2023 ACF Regionals (January 28, 2023) Global Announcement

Post by VSCOelasticity »

Can this set please be posted on the archive?
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Re: 2023 ACF Regionals (January 28, 2023) Global Announcement

Post by Chimango Caracara »

The packets have been uploaded to the archive. Teams who submitted a packet may fill out this form before April 1 to receive feedback on their submissions.
Last edited by Chimango Caracara on Sun Mar 05, 2023 11:42 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: 2023 ACF Regionals (January 28, 2023) Global Announcement

Post by Gemomania »

The form seems to be inaccessible, at least for me
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Re: 2023 ACF Regionals (January 28, 2023) Global Announcement

Post by Chimango Caracara »

Gemomania wrote: Sun Mar 05, 2023 12:59 am The form seems to be inaccessible, at least for me
It should be fixed now.
Nick Jensen
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