Difference between revisions of "Good quizbowl"
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#A tournament structure and management that is fair to all teams, allows all teams to play many matches, follows rules that are announced in advance, and preferably does not eliminate a team from championship contention for losing one match | #A tournament structure and management that is fair to all teams, allows all teams to play many matches, follows rules that are announced in advance, and preferably does not eliminate a team from championship contention for losing one match | ||
| − | Competitions which deviate from the fairness and competitive spirit of good quizbowl by lacking the above are [[bad quizbowl]] or [[not quizbowl]]. | + | Competitions which deviate from the fairness and competitive spirit of good quizbowl by lacking the above are [[bad quizbowl]] or [[Quizbowl#Formats|not quizbowl]]. |
Though use of the [[tossup-bonus format]] is not essential to good quizbowl, an overwhelming majority of good quizbowl tournaments use that format. | Though use of the [[tossup-bonus format]] is not essential to good quizbowl, an overwhelming majority of good quizbowl tournaments use that format. | ||
Revision as of 06:08, 30 July 2013
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Good quizbowl is a designation which refers to those quizbowl conventions, questions, and tournaments that reward teams for demonstrating differing levels of academic knowledge in a fair and consistent manner. Necessary features of good quizbowl include:
- Questions that consistently reward knowledge of a topic over buzzer speed, as exemplified by tossups that contain many clues arranged in rough order from most obscure to least obscure (pyramidality) and bonuses/team rounds that contain "easy", "medium", and "hard" parts
- Questions whose clues uniquely point to their desired answer(s) and which are written clearly
- A range of topics that the target audience should and does know much about, supplemented by subjects that are not as well known but nevertheless demonstrably important and answerable (the canon for that level)
- A distribution of questions that primarily emphasizes the academic nature of quizbowl and eschews spelling, excess general knowledge or trash, and other non-academic "fluff" (see Trivia)
- A tournament structure and management that is fair to all teams, allows all teams to play many matches, follows rules that are announced in advance, and preferably does not eliminate a team from championship contention for losing one match
Competitions which deviate from the fairness and competitive spirit of good quizbowl by lacking the above are bad quizbowl or not quizbowl.
Though use of the tossup-bonus format is not essential to good quizbowl, an overwhelming majority of good quizbowl tournaments use that format.
A common fallacy among those who do not understand quizbowl theory is to confuse good quizbowl with high-difficulty quizbowl. Actually, good quizbowl using tossups and bonuses should have tossups that get answered the vast majority of times and bonuses that have one part that gets answered the vast majority of times.
Another common fallacy is to consider pyramidality, however defined, as the be-all and end-all of what is good. Pyramidality is important, but as you can see above there are other important factors to consider.