2024 PACE NSC Thanks and Editor Discussion

[Krik? Krik?! KRIIIIK!!!]

Hi everyone, a week out from the 2024 NSC, and I wanted to quickly thank everyone who helped create the set again.

Editors - David Bass, Mike Bentley, Jaimie Carlson, Vincent Du, Jim Fan, Arjun Nageswaran, Hari Parameswaran, Victor Pavao, Adam Silverman, Kevin Thomas, Chandler West, and Ivvone Zhou

Writers - Ethan Ashbrook, Zac Bennett, Anson Berns, Benjamin Chapman, Tony Chen, Justine French, Gabbi Guedes, Wonyoung Jang, Alyssa Jorgensen, Athena Kern, Joseph Krol, Jeffrey Liu, Chauncey Lo, Brianna Magin, Jonathan Magin, Lalit Maharjan, Joel Miles, Tim Morrison, Sinecio Morales, Yingzhi Nyang, Grant Peet, Sudheer Potru, Abhinav Rachakonda, Anuttam Ramji, Shahar Schwartz, Bryanna Shao, Clark Smith, Jon Suh, Anthony Troullier, Forrest Weintraub, Ai Xing, and Steven Yuan

Proofers - Zac Bennett, Benjamin Chapman, Anna Csiki-Fejer, JinAh Kim, Benjamin Kirk, Bryanna Shao, Forrest Weintraub, and Marianna Zhang

Playtesters - Henry Atkins, Jacob Augelli, Iain Carpenter, Eric Chang, Jacob Egol, Henry Goff, Jason Golfinos, Eric Gunter, Taylor Harvey, Nick Jensen, Kevin Jiang, JinAh Kim, Evan Knox, Vicki Li, Mitch McCullar, Colin McNamara, Sharath Narayan, Danny Peelen, Grant Peet, Arthur Ramsay, Subhamitra Roychoudhury, Ray Sun, Eleanor Settle, Rebecca Thomas, Ashish Subramanian, Coby Tran, Brandon Weiss, Kevin Ye, and Jisoo Yoo

I am very grateful for the opportunity to have head-edited the set again this year. I unfortunately haven't had time to properly collected my thoughts and thanks for the tournament yet, but I wanted to open this thread for the editors, writers, or others to share some of their thoughts about the tourmanent.

Buzzpoints for the 2024 PACE NSC can be found here.

[Mike Bentley]

Thanks to everyone who helped produce and play the set!

I edited the Cross History, Geography, Current Events, and Other categories.

In Geography, I try to approach that category in a way that brings in different types of knowledge. This includes some adventurous answer lines that typically aren't in this category at this level, such as the tossups on snow and skateboarding. I find that keeping geography questions intellectually interesting often results in some clues bleeding in from other categories.

For Cross History, my vision with that category is to use it as a way to capture topics that are hard to ask about on their own when within one strict geographical boundary. Examples include the tossups on orphans and the oil crisis (the latter of which was more adventurously clued around the world, but was made more American focused in editing to keep it buzzable throughout). I think there are a lot of ways of approaching knowledge that bleeds across quizbowl's traditional divisions. This can sometimes result in common links that jump from place to place. I have a much greater tolerance for those type of questions compared to a "tight theme" that plays harder.

[DavidB256]

After taking on 2.5 editing gigs last year and disappointing myself in all of them, this set is the most content that I've ever felt with my work on a quizbowl project. I've grown a lot as a player, writer, and scientist over the last year (e.g. increasing my individual physics points by a factor of negative seven between 2023 and 2024 ACF Nationals), and I do believe that this growth is reflected in the questions that I wrote (~36 science questions, mostly in my own categories) and edited (23/23 physics and 23/23 other science) for this set. I was happy and slightly surprised to see warm reception of my categories in the set's discussion server and conversion stats that appear to be fairer than the needless brutality of my contributions to the 2023 NSC and the 2023 Chicago Open.

Most of my foreseeable mistakes in this set fall into the categories of
(1) not listening to colleagues' repeated warnings of harshness. Players were spared my physics (h) on phenomenology and my (e) on Dirac, but I stubbornly kept the (h) on isobars and the (m) on banked turns.
(2) relying too much on quotes to imply that players should seek binary association, as exemplified by poor conversion of the (e) thin films that stated "'thin'," the (e) on one billion years that stated "'Giga annum'," and the (e) on cosmic rays that stated "'cosmic'." I realize now that this form of cluing puts too much onus on moderators' enunciation.
(3) writing top-heavy tossups with cliffs immediately out of power, as exemplified by clues on type-I error, estuaries' salinity, and the quantity that isn't luminosity in the Tully–Fisher relation.

I'd like to give my biggest thanks to Ganon Evans, who held faith in me despite my delinquency on last year's NSC and through my several episodes of editing questions during their respective playtesting sessions. Ganon has been a great mentor and manager for me over the last two years. Adam Silverman provided tireless reflection and feedback on my questions. I could not have succeeded in whatever capacity that I have without his sage solidarity or question contributions. Forrest Weintraub served me a hefty, all-American portion of physics and astronomy questions that is so evidently written by someone not burdened with the programming of a high school quizbowl career. I had a veritable blast, hoot, and holler editing the deep cuts displayed in the tossup on (rotational) velocity, the tossup on uncertainty, and the bonus on optical depth. I believe that these questions would have fielded better conversion stats under the shepherding of a more experienced editor. Tossing up parsecs! What! Ben Chapman continued to be an invaluable physics contributor, writing luscious, macronutrient-rich renditions of bread-and-butter topics, as in the nodal analysis bonus and the neutrons tossup. Lalit Maharjan also writes from the engineer's perspective, dishing me the tossup on LEDs that was focused around the invention of blue LEDs and a tossup on the Michelson–Morley experiment that evolved into the tossup on interferometers. Jeffrey Liu wrote me the awesome tossup on slipping, which is absolutely not an answerline that I would have independently considered—I'm excited to see what he gets up to post-Mentorship Program! Additional valuable contributions and inspirations came from Joseph Krol, Mike Bentley, Vincent Du, and Abhinav Rachakonda.

I initially wrote in the discussion server that I sought "to limit science history clues largely to specific questions (namely the chaos tossup, Cavendish tossup, and cosmic rays bonus)," but upon further reflection, I see that a decent number of my questions featured singular historical clues, like the lead-in to the RAM tossup. I do not have any advanced thoughts on this topic, but I am broadly proud to have largely kept my toes out of the pool, in which I waded last year, of clues that could be learned independently from engagement with the related science.

I'll forever be surprised that 25 players knew about the use of laser cooling's use to produce BECs.

My categories were subdistributed thus, with topics followed liberally:
Physics: 4/4 classical mechanics, 4/4 EM, 2/2 QM, 2/2 thermodynamics+statistical mechanics, 1/1 relativity, 1/1 optics+waves, 1/1 fluid mechanics, 1/1 condensed matter, 1/1 nuclear, 1/1 experimental+observational, 3/3 other+any
Other science: 5/5 mathematics, 1/1 statistics, 5/6 astronomy, 5/4 Earth science, 5/5 computer science, 2/2 engineering+misc.

[ivvone]

I edited the 22/22 Music, 4/4 Opera, and 1/1 Musical Theatre for a total of 27/27, which I’ll collectively refer to as the “music.” Thanks to Ganon for giving me the opportunity to edit PACE NSC, and for being supportive and communicative throughout set production!

Firstly, the writers:

• Huge thanks to Forrest Weintraub, who brought her hefty expertise to write 11/7 music questions -- an entire third of the category! Some of my favorite questions were the Germany TU cluing the Frankfurt Radio Symphony and Deutsche Grammophon, the bagpipes TU in which I learned that the musette was a bagpipe, and the maracas / egg / Brazil bonus that was simply interesting and good. Not only did she write these excellent questions, she also provided useful feedback and suggestions during playtesting. If you liked any of the music, it was certainly because of Forrest.

• Mr. Headitor Ganon Evans bookended the music by writing the first new question in the category this year (the Alexander Nevsky / Prokofiev / psalms bonus) as well as the last music bonus this year (the elegant Hummel / Esterhazy / trumpet bonus), with more gems along the way.

• Ethan Ashbrook offered to write a baroque music bonus very early on, which I am grateful for! Ethan wrote some awesome questions that cover core areas of music history from a fresh lens. I especially liked the answerline of St. Mark’s Basilica in the St. Mark’s / dynamics / Monteverdi bonus.

• Immense thanks also to Mike Bentley, Vincent Du, Jim Fan, Wonyoung Jang, Joseph Krol, Jeffrey Liu, Lalit Maharjan, and Steven Yuan, who each wrote a question. For the sake of keeping this message short-ish, I’ll refrain from listing out everyone’s question.

• Of the questions I wrote, I liked asking about the Habanera, cluing Yunchan Lim in the Rachmaninoff / Van Cliburn / Transcendental Etudes bonus, and cluing Jonathon Heyward and Brian Balmages in the bands / folk songs / Baltimore bonus.

Thank you to all playtesters, but especially Jacob Egol, who provided incredibly detailed, informative, and useful feedback on almost every single question. In the last days of set production, I also asked Ophir Lifshitz for a second opinion on a few questions, and he offered both concrete feedback and a glimpse into his philosophy towards music questions.

I don’t have a cohesive philosophy regarding music questions in quizbowl, but there were two guiding principles in the questions I wrote: 1) Reward people who play instruments and 2) Reward engaged listeners of classical music. I really liked the 2023 PACE NSC music questions when I playtested them, so I tried to emulate the general difficulty of this year's questions on the last two years' questions, with a few additional goals:

• Ask about the music that lots of people, not only quizbowlers, have heard. This includes:
  • music that the typical person has heard in movies or commercials or YouTube videos but may not know the name of (the rondo of Mozart's Horn Concerto No. 4, Rossini overtures like from The Barber of Seville)
  • famous excerpts (Habanera, “Ode to Joy”)
  • more recently famous things (Hadestown)

• include more “girl content,” especially about notable female composers (Fanny Mendelssohn, Clara Schumann, Saariaho, Tailleferre)

• clue recent goings-on in the classical music world (200th anniversary of Beethoven 9, Yunchan Lim going viral, etc.)

• slip in some more world music / folk music

• limit the amount of note-spelling clues to make the questions feel less obscure to non-music players -- I could have done better with this

Above all, I wanted to produce something that would be fun and satisfying to play. I'm pretty proud of the work we accomplished with this year's NSC, and the generally-positive feedback I've received is heartening. I've left out a few aspects I'm dissatisfied with in my own work, but I'd love to hear any (more) feedback, positive or negative.

[adamsil]

I would like to extend my sincerest thanks to the writers who contributed to the biology and chemistry: David, Ganon, Abhinav, Sinecio, Sudheer, and Joseph Krol. And also to our excellent corps of playtesters—I would like to single out Kevin, Ivvone, Ben, and Forrest for their consistently keen internal feedback, and Jinah, Taylor, and Victor Prieto for providing particularly helpful external feedback.

I did not intend to change much from my editing philosophy from last year other than easing up on difficulty a tad on bonus middle parts. I aimed to keep tossups roughly the same. In practice, the bonus numbers looked overall great (90-50-18ish for all of the science categories) and the bio tossups hit the spot I wanted in power numbers and conversion, but the chemistry played more difficult than last year. We did increase the chemistry to a full 1/1 this year (with the caveat that some of that increase was achieved by explicitly taking questions that straddled the bio-chem divide and placing them in chemistry instead.) But there were a couple of adventurous chemistry answerlines and themes that had much lower conversion or early buzz rates than I anticipated (electrolytes, bond length, alkenes on polyolefin cluing). My apologies for overshooting there.

In the set discussion server I wrote a long post about the dearth of organic chemistry in this set. To archive those thoughts, and potentially spur discussion from people not in that server, I’m going to include it here, too, slightly edited for clarity. I’m happy to discuss these points further below or split it into an additional conversation if others would like to weigh in.



Last year, I received feedback that last year’s explicit organic chem distribution (which was just 1/1) was too small, and so I deliberately doubled it this year to 2/2* (alkenes, benzene, butane/CFC/tertiary, bonding/triple bond/aromatic). Indeed “not enough organic” is a recurring complaint on questions that I have written for a decade now, see e.g., viewtopic.php?p=304073#p304073).

That thread contained my rationale for keeping organic low in NSC nine years ago. To be honest, that’s changed and my primary motivation for it now is somewhat more subjective: I don’t think organic chemistry is important enough to ask high schoolers about.

I’ll caveat that I have degrees in chemistry and chemical engineering, I’ve taken and enjoyed tons of organic chemistry classes, I formally self-studied it in HS and took a bunch of organic electives in college. But as a more mature scientist, I feel reasonably confident saying that almost no practicing chemists use synthetic organic chemistry. Pharma is in a long pivot away from small molecules toward biologics and there’s a much greater thrust for green/bio-transformative reactions across the chemical industry. Deriving syntheses and figuring out mechanisms is fun in the same way that two-column geometry proofs are fun ("if you like that kind of thing"). In the college game, it makes sense to ask more about it, because tons of people take undergraduate organic chemistry. But it’s largely for teaching chemical problem-solving/intuition: virtually nobody in the world needs to know the Diels-Alder reaction mechanism. Almost nobody researches organic chemistry and people that do do it often work in the context of biological systems (e.g., click chemists doing TCO/tetrazine DA reactions) (I also think there is far too much organic chemistry in high-difficulty collegiate quizbowl, although that’s for a different time.)

In high school, I think this point is less muddy. If there’s a legitimate reason why an organic topic is important, I’m happy to engage: e.g., that’s why the alkenes tossup was entirely about polyolefins, because they are the most important class of polymers and I wanted to probe people’s understanding of addition polymerization, which is the most important organic reaction in the world today from an economic perspective.

I would love to hear a reasoned rationale on why more organic chemistry is warranted. But if it’s just “I like organic chemistry and I don’t like electrochemistry” or “it’s 1/3 organic at HSNCT”, that’s not really an argument I can contest. (I use electrochemistry here as an example of something that is taught to a greater extent in high schools, even if it shows up less in the college game, cause it’s harder to write tossups about. But surely it’s more important for the average person to know what an electrolyte is, than to know what a ketone is!)

I’ve long been a card-carrying member of the “back to the classroom” cabal in quizbowl science writing, but it just doesn’t work that well for high school chemistry. And to prevent the spread of jargon-bowl, we should be writing questions that are at least interesting to laypeople or are important to specialists. Ideally both. Organic chemistry is neither.

[touchpack]

Last year, I received feedback that last year’s explicit organic chem distribution (which was just 1/1) was too small, and so I deliberately doubled it this year to 2/2* (alkenes, benzene, butane/CFC/tertiary, bonding/triple bond/aromatic). Indeed “not enough organic” is a recurring complaint on questions that I have written for a decade now, see e.g., viewtopic.php?p=304073#p304073).

That thread contained my rationale for keeping organic low in NSC nine years ago. To be honest, that’s changed and my primary motivation for it now is somewhat more subjective: I don’t think organic chemistry is important enough to ask high schoolers about.

I’ll caveat that I have degrees in chemistry and chemical engineering, I’ve taken and enjoyed tons of organic chemistry classes, I formally self-studied it in HS and took a bunch of organic electives in college. But as a more mature scientist, I feel reasonably confident saying that almost no practicing chemists use synthetic organic chemistry. Pharma is in a long pivot away from small molecules toward biologics and there’s a much greater thrust for green/bio-transformative reactions across the chemical industry. Deriving syntheses and figuring out mechanisms is fun in the same way that two-column geometry proofs are fun ("if you like that kind of thing"). In the college game, it makes sense to ask more about it, because tons of people take undergraduate organic chemistry. But it’s largely for teaching chemical problem-solving/intuition: virtually nobody in the world needs to know the Diels-Alder reaction mechanism. Almost nobody researches organic chemistry and people that do do it often work in the context of biological systems (e.g., click chemists doing TCO/tetrazine DA reactions) (I also think there is far too much organic chemistry in high-difficulty collegiate quizbowl, although that’s for a different time.)

In high school, I think this point is less muddy. If there’s a legitimate reason why an organic topic is important, I’m happy to engage: e.g., that’s why the alkenes tossup was entirely about polyolefins, because they are the most important class of polymers and I wanted to probe people’s understanding of addition polymerization, which is the most important organic reaction in the world today from an economic perspective.

I would love to hear a reasoned rationale on why more organic chemistry is warranted. But if it’s just “I like organic chemistry and I don’t like electrochemistry” or “it’s 1/3 organic at HSNCT”, that’s not really an argument I can contest. (I use electrochemistry here as an example of something that is taught to a greater extent in high schools, even if it shows up less in the college game, cause it’s harder to write tossups about. But surely it’s more important for the average person to know what an electrolyte is, than to know what a ketone is!)

I’ve long been a card-carrying member of the “back to the classroom” cabal in quizbowl science writing, but it just doesn’t work that well for high school chemistry. And to prevent the spread of jargon-bowl, we should be writing questions that are at least interesting to laypeople or are important to specialists. Ideally both. Organic chemistry is neither.

I thought this was very interesting to read, thanks for posting. I hadn't thought about how pharma is trending away from small molecules could impact what the quizbowl distribution should look like. I agree that the declining importance of organic synthesis in real-world research should be reflected in quizbowl, but I also think the importance of organic chemistry in pedagogy/scaffolding outweighs its declining importance in research. After all, the good majority of people playing this game who have engaged with chemistry in the real world have done so either primarily or exclusively through classes, not research or employment. It's certainly true that the classroom canon in science at the high school level is much smaller, and that necessarily diminishes the fraction of questions that are sourced primarily from classroom canon (god, imagine if you had to write the NSC/HSNCT physics distribution entirely from AP physics C. It would not be possible!). However, I do still think that the classroom canon should be the single most important factor that goes into topic selection.

That said, I'm not sure how much that actually argues in favor of "more orgo". Many AP chem classes teach a tiny bit of very, very rudimentary organic chemistry, but to learn organic chemistry topics that come up in quizbowl frequently requires taking a separate organic chemistry class, and I'm not really sure how many high schoolers do that. If the good high school science players all start telling me "hey I took organic chemistry and was disappointed at how few points that got me at this tournament", I would certainly think very strongly about increasing the amount of orgo in HSNCT.

As the person who has edited the chemistry for HSNCT for the last 7 years, it decidedly is not "1/3 organic at HSNCT". Of questions explicitly coded as organic chemistry, there were 5 questions (in 31 packets) in this year's set, 7 in last year's set, and 10 in 2022's set. So on average, for a set of NSC 2024's size, I've been having.... 5 organic chemistry questions, compared to Adam's 4. I'm certainly open to writing more of it though, if I am underestimating how many HS players are taking organic classes.

[adamsil]

I thought this was very interesting to read, thanks for posting. I hadn't thought about how pharma is trending away from small molecules could impact what the quizbowl distribution should look like. I agree that the declining importance of organic synthesis in real-world research should be reflected in quizbowl, but I also think the importance of organic chemistry in pedagogy/scaffolding outweighs its declining importance in research. After all, the good majority of people playing this game who have engaged with chemistry in the real world have done so either primarily or exclusively through classes, not research or employment. It's certainly true that the classroom canon in science at the high school level is much smaller, and that necessarily diminishes the fraction of questions that are sourced primarily from classroom canon (god, imagine if you had to write the NSC/HSNCT physics distribution entirely from AP physics C. It would not be possible!). However, I do still think that the classroom canon should be the single most important factor that goes into topic selection.

That said, I'm not sure how much that actually argues in favor of "more orgo". Many AP chem classes teach a tiny bit of very, very rudimentary organic chemistry, but to learn organic chemistry topics that come up in quizbowl frequently requires taking a separate organic chemistry class, and I'm not really sure how many high schoolers do that. If the good high school science players all start telling me "hey I took organic chemistry and was disappointed at how few points that got me at this tournament", I would certainly think very strongly about increasing the amount of orgo in HSNCT.

As the person who has edited the chemistry for HSNCT for the last 7 years, it decidedly is not "1/3 organic at HSNCT". Of questions explicitly coded as organic chemistry, there were 5 questions (in 31 packets) in this year's set, 7 in last year's set, and 10 in 2022's set. So on average, for a set of NSC 2024's size, I've been having.... 5 organic chemistry questions, compared to Adam's 4. I'm certainly open to writing more of it though, if I am underestimating how many HS players are taking organic classes.

My apologies for the extremely bad wording--I did not mean to imply that HSNCT actually has that much organic chemistry!

Billy, you and I have historically agreed on these points (as we did in that thread nine years ago!) and I have no argument with you on this point. I do think it's worth discussing how we, as chemistry writers, can make organic chemistry questions (at the collegiate level, particularly) more accessible to general audiences. Unlike nearly every other topic in the natural sciences, synthetic organic chemistry lacks an intrinsic value of "this is worth knowing because this is how the world works." (The most apt comparisons in science that I can think of are applied math, computer science, and engineering, all subjects which have pivoted in recent years to move away from the classroom and instead now reflect what practitioners actually do.)