MYSTERIUM
The Maryland/Yale Spring Tournament Edited for Regular difficulty In University Material (MYSTERIUM) was a collegiate regular difficulty tournament written by members of the Maryland and Yale teams (with Sriram Pendyala) for Spring 2016. The tournament was head edited by Jacob Reed, with help from Jordan Brownstein and Ophir Lifshitz; other writers included Weijia Cheng, Naveed Chowdhury, and Ani Perumalla (Maryland), and Stephen Eltinge, Adam Fine, Isaac Kirk-Davidoff, and Laurence Li (Yale).
The tournament was conceived as something of an experiment in simultaneously returning to "classical" regular difficulty and maintaining a thorough emphasis on "curricular" content in all subjects—maintaining a relationship to college curricula like that of advanced high school sets to high school curricula. Thus, the distribution, was slightly recalibrated. Following on its success at STIMPY, the arts distribution was reconfigured as 1/1 each "visual," "auditory," and "other" (rather than the usual "painting," "classical music," "other" split). Moreover, the "thought" portion of the distribution was expanded, with economics and psychology filling the traditional 1/1 social science, and an additional 0.5/0.5 other social sciences, as well as 0.5/0.5 "other thought" (literary criticism, art history, historiography, etc.) in the style of Will Holub-Moorman Jacob Reed's 2015 VICO tournament. As a result of this expansion, the mythology and "other" (current events, geography, other academic, trash) were both shrunk to 0.5/0.5. Additionally, about 2/3 of the psychology was written from a neuroscience perspective.
The tournament was largely well-received, particularly Stephen Eltinge's physics; complaints largely concerned the difficulty of some of the history and "thought" (especially the philosophy and historiography).
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