CMST II

Not to be confused with CMST, the middle school set.

CMST II (loosely standing for Chicago-Maryland Spearheaded Tournament) was a open tournament held in the fall of 2022. It was head-edited by John Marvin of The University of Chicago, with Adam Fine, Wonyoung Jang, Jason Golfinos, Clark Smith as subject editors. [1]

The tournament was written at a "Nationals-minus" (3.5 dot) difficulty. It made some changes to traditional collegiate quizbowl norms, including:

• Powers are intended to be worth 20 points; negs incur no scoring penalty
• Packets of 22/22
  • Expansion of Fine Arts to 4/4, including guaranteed "Other music" (jazz, blues, fusion, etc.) in every packet
  • Expansion of Thought to 3/3, including distinct "Philosophy 1" and "Philosophy 2" subdistributions getting 1/1 apiece
  • Expansion of Social Science to 2/2, including distinct "Soft" and "Hard" subdistributions getting 1/1 apiece
  • Elimination of standalone Mythology and Current Events categories, with a guarantee of 1/1 "decentralized" Mythology content across the various categories per packet (and some unspecified amount of current events spread about as well)

The "II" in the name may allude to Cal's Mid-Spring Tournament, a prior open of similar difficulty, using the same initialism in 2018.