Pennsylvania State Academic Competition
The Pennsylvania State Academic Competition is a quizbowl tournament held each year in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The winning team received a scholarship to the Panasonic Academic Challenge.
History
The Pennsylvania State Academic Competition was started in 1992 by Pennsylvania Representative Joseph Pitts. The first year contained 12 qualifying schools but has since been expanded to one school for each of Pennsylvania's 29 "intermediate units".
The tournament is held every year around May in the state House of Representatives and Senate Chambers. It is run by the Chester County Intermediate Unit.
The competition is televised live by the Pennsylvania Cable Network (PCN) and rebroadcast throughout the year.
Format
Three teams compete head-to-head in each game in the tournament. The game is broken into two tossup rounds made up of 10 questions each, and two "fanfare" rounds where each table is given a series of 6 questions. Tossup rounds allow conferring before a team buzzes in, and give the team up to 15 seconds after the entire question is read to come up with an answer. One buzzer is supplied to each player. Fanfare rounds are 60 second timed affairs. Each team gets one fanfare per round. Fanfare questions are asked in rapid succession and once a team passes on a question, they are not permitted to go back to answer it.
The day's preliminary matches are followed by 3 semi-finals and final match for the top 9 and 3 teams respectively.
Qualifying
Qualifying teams, usually the winners of local championships, are chosen by the various intermediate units. In addition, the previous year's champion receives an automatic bid to attend the tournament.
Questions
Question categories include Contemporary Events, World History, Literature, American History, Science, and Potpourri. Each question is rated by difficulty and questions are then evenly dispersed between teams. All answers are worth 5 points.
This is the tournament which not only included the infamous question "What kind of colleges are best for women? Answer: Women's colleges" to begin with, but recycled it from one year to the next. Another question from this tournament was "Cetology is the study of whales. For 10 points, who wrote Moby Dick?" Looking only at tournaments with state championship implications, this one may take the crown for actually having the worst questions out of many, many bad local question writer options.
2003 was notable for having at least 4 different questions on characters from Catch 22 as tossups in different rounds, as well as at least 4 different questions on ranks in the US military in different rounds.
Winners
- 2013: Conestoga
- 2012: B. Reed Henderson
- 2011: B. Reed Henderson
- 2010: West Chester Rustin
- 2009: Wilson
- 2008: State College
- 2007: Scranton
- 2006: State College
- 2005: Emmaus
- 2004: Emmaus
- 2003: Emmaus
- 2002: Downingtown
- 2001: Moravian
- 2000: Lancaster Catholic
- 1999: Manheim Township
- 1998: Manheim Township
- 1997: State College
- 1996: West Chester East
- 1995: General McLane
- 1994: Downingtown
- 1993: Radnor
- 1992: Conestoga