Good quizbowl
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).
- 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 collective set of these subjects is sometimes called the canon).
- 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".
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, or to consider pyramidality, however defined, as the be-all and end-all of what is good.