Graduate student

A graduate student is a college student who is pursuing a higher academic degree like a master's or Ph.D, or a professional degree like a MD, MBA, or JD.

All graduate students are "not undergraduate eligible" - however, not every student without undergrad eligibility is a graduate student. This is because all rulesets set a limit on the amount of time a student can be an undergraduate, excluding non-traditional students who spend more than roughly four years to graduate.

History of eligibility rules

Other than tournaments explicitly noted as excluding graduate students (undergraduate tournaments and some novice tournaments), grad students are permitted to play any college tournament; in particular, for tournaments that allow grad students at all, there is no limit on the number of grad students who may be on a particular team.

Prior to 2011, graduate students were banned from NAQT Division II. Changes in that year made graduate status irrelevant to the Division II eligibility criteria.

For approximately the last 20 years of its program ending in 2008, College Bowl limited teams to one graduate student in addition to having several other unique eligibility rules. At prior times, a 2 graduate student limit or a total ban on graduate students were also used in College Bowl.

Controversy

The eligibility of graduate students in quiz bowl is a perennial source for argument. Defenders of the status quo hold that quiz bowl is a game for all college students including grad students, and that the game benefits from having a wider range of players. Opponents argue that the presence of grad students stifles the ambitions of the undergraduate portion of the community through their control over the game and its discourse.

An important aspect to remember when participating in such discussions is that there is nothing intrinsically exceptional or unfair about being a graduate student. Grad students are not a monolith. Though their detractors typically focus on specific players that are considered too old or too good or to have played too long, there are plenty of other grad students who don't meet any of these criteria.

Thus, it is most relevant to focus on the two aspects that lie at the heart of all of these discussions:

• how to handle players who are too good
• how to handle players who are too old

Because neither of these things are actually related to being enrolled in graduate school these topics also appear when discussing other kinds of demarcation problem, like "who gets to be an undergraduate" or "what counts as a small school".

Skill

The most common complaint issued against grad students is that they are too good. As previously stated, it is untrue to say that all grad students are too good - even if many are, there are plenty that are not. However, it is true that many of the best players in quiz bowl have been grad students. Indeed, several nationals winning teams have been led by top players who returned to grad school after a multiple year hiatus. This is discussed more in the exceptions section.

Pro-restrictions

Anti

The existence of players/teams who are "too good" (by some definition) is a negative to other teams. Commonly cited reasons include that winning nationals needs to be a realistic goal to be motivation, a general desire for individual teams to not be consistently dominant, and the idea of quiz bowl being an "amateur" competition. This attitude is more common among the lower skill brackets that make up the "silent majority" of the player base, meaning that it would be in the interests of the community to limit eligibility for good players. Players who express anecdata to the contrary have been biased by their ability to tolerate this hostile competitive environment.

It is unclear what the average response to having teams who are "too good" is. At least some people view it as neutral or positive and it would be unreasonable to reject their opinions just because they are enfranchised enough to participate in an open discussion, especially in appeal to the undefinable opinions of a silent portion of the community. Any argument for removing grad students should directly address why being a grad student specifically is a problematic category because limiting player skill is not a coherent reason to limit eligibility. Removing good players because they are good creates mickey mouse championships and compromises the competitive nature of the game.

It may be tempting to substitute "grad student" in for "too good" but these arguments are ultimately true of all relative skill differences. These are only relevant to grad students if you believe that the career length, coursework, and/or motivation of grad students allows them (or causes them) to become more skilled. This will be further discussed in the next section.

Some people have proposed creating separate "undergraduate" and "collegiate open" divisions rather than banning grad students. Though largely a relabeling, this change would imply an elevated prestige for undergraduate competitions like the UCT.

Age

There are several age-related facets to people's issues with grad students:

• more time playing is unfair because it provides more time to get good
• more time playing is unfair because not everyone gets to play that long
• actual ageism

Time to get good

The relationship between time as a grad student and time to get good is tenuous at best and have also been discussed (with anecdata) in the "back to the classroom" article.

Some attribute the difference to more years alive and aware for people to acquire "real knowledge", as well as an opportunity for additional coursework. However, the vast size of the quiz bowl canon means that these benefits are minimal and the most important predictor of "being good at quiz bowl" remains "trying to be good at quiz bowl" - that is, studying.

It is difficult to quantify but the anecdata suggest that the average grad student studies much less than their undergraduate counterpart due to being much busier. It has even been proposed that the greatest improvement in skill comes in a player's final years of undergraduate. In any given year, both the top scorers and the players on top 10 teams at ACF Nationals have roughly equal odds to be an undergrad or not (though the ratio was skewed more towards undergraduates before the pandemic).