Good quizbowl
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Good quizbowl is a designation which refers to 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)
- An emphasis on the academic nature of quizbowl and eschewal of questions on excess general knowledge or trash, spelling, 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.
Common Misconceptions about "Good Quizbowl"
- Confusing good quizbowl with high-difficulty quizbowl. Actually, good quizbowl using pyramidal tossups and bonuses should have tossups that get answered most often by a wider array of teams than bad quizbowl formats that often use a few or just one clue speed-check questions. Using good quizbowl practices, both the best and the worst teams at a tournament should have competitive matches on the same set of questions that enable all players to learn and be rewarded for what they know.
- Considering only the use of pyramidal questions to be necessary for "good quizbowl." Pyramidality is important, but as you can see above there are other important factors to consider in a competition such as the format, seeding, and question distribution in order for it to be considered "good quizbowl." Practices such as seeding teams completely at random or grouping the top teams all in one prelim bracket are certainly bad quizbowl regardless of what questions are used.
- Claiming that good quizbowl moves too slowly. Poorly-run tournaments and ill-trained moderators in the past may have left some teams with a false impression about the speed of good quizbowl, but in general most good quizbowl tournaments now average under 30 minutes a round. As anyone who has attended the HSNCT can attest, good quizbowl can move very quickly and cover a wide range of material in a short amount of time.