Quizbowl

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Quizbowl, sometimes spelled Quiz Bowl, is the most common name for a competition involving answering knowledge-testing questions with a buzzer. Quizbowl has many different names and is played in many different formats throughout the world, but the most common format on the national high school and college level is a two-team competition in which the teams compete to buzz in on tossup questions and then collaborate on bonus questions.

The typical quizbowl competition features questions from a wide variety of academic subjects, including literature, science, history, religion, mythology, and philosophy, arts, social science, and geography, so teams must have a well-rounded knowledge base to score more points than their opponents and win games.

Formats

The college game is in general more uniform than the high school game. The main formats are ACF and NAQT. CBI, a descendant of the old televised College Bowl game which used to be the main college format, fell out of favor with most people that enjoy good quizbowl for numerous reasons (see bad quizbowl), and in June 2008 the CBI program was suspended indefinitely.

The high school game is very diverse, although national tournaments like NAQT's HSNCT and PACE's NSC help unify different regions of the country. Both of those tournaments feature formats that are similar to the predominant college game, in that they feature pyramidal questions (which have many clues allowing teams with expert knowledge to distinguish themselves from people with more basic knowledge) and generally focus on academic subjects. The four quarter format is used in such good quizbowl competitions as the National History Bee and Bowl, although many of the most prominent tournaments in four quarter, such as the NAC, are known to not represent good quizbowl (see Criticisms of the NAC).

History

United States

Don Reid developed a quizzing game for soldiers during WWII. He modified his game to produce College Bowl for radio in 1953, featuring teams of college students. College Bowl later moved to, then left, television, and its format was further modified to create the different quizbowl formats offered today.

Canada

I.Q. was a CBC radio quiz show for high school teams based on College Bowl's format. It was canceled at about the same time that CBC Television began airing Reach for the Top, based on the UK's Top of the Form radio show. Reach for the Top left television in 1985, but continues within schools. More recently, good quizbowl tournaments have emerged in Canada, largely through the establishment of events running the same questions as American tournaments, with some additional Canadian content added.

United Kingdom

BBC radio produced Top of the Form for high school students in 1948 and continued into the 1980s. At the university level, Don Reid brought College Bowl's format to British television with University Challenge in 1962, a program that still airs to this day. Similarly to Canada, a few events have been established using American questions, such as the NAQT British Student Quiz Championships.

What is and is not quizbowl

While some opine that College Bowl, the National Academic Championship, and bizarre state formats such as OAC are so aberrant that they should not be considered the same game as mainstream quizbowl, this division is controversial and often exaggerated for rhetorical effect. What is clear to almost everyone is that the following things are not quizbowl, even though many of the same people who play quizbowl are interested in them. Editors of the Wikipedia article on quizbowl and people looking to crow about their own accomplishments should take note:

  • Written tests or competitions or anything that does not use a buzzer at any time
  • Network game shows
  • Bar trivia/NTN
  • Trivial Pursuit and other board games
  • Subject-specific tournaments run by and largely for non-quizbowl people (Science Bowl, Entomology Bowl, Beef Bowl, and so on)

Such activities may have plenty of merits, but they are not quizbowl.

Tournaments

Quizbowl teams typically play each other at tournaments. Most tournaments do not require any sort of qualifier. A few tournaments, usually national tournaments, restrict eligibility to teams that qualify by winning smaller, local tournaments.

Most tournaments, especially at the college and elite high school levels, consist of two teams competing head to head in individual rounds on a packet of questions. Tournaments usually feature a number of preliminary rounds before teams are seeded into some sort of playoff structure. College tournaments tend to favor using a round robin playoff schedule so that more games are played by each team, as do most good high school events, though many high school tournaments do use an elimination playoff system.

In the high school game, tournament questions almost always come from an outside vendor or are written by the organization hosting the tournament. This is also true for college tournaments held on NAQT questions. mACF and ACF college tournaments, however, usually are usually packet submission. Each team attending a packet submission tournament writes a packet (somewhere around 20-26 tossups and bonuses) of questions which are then usually sent to an editor or team of editors who weed out any duplicates, changing and/or replacing questions that are problematic. Since individual teams have not told the other teams what they've written, packet submission tournaments are able to take place by having the team that wrote the packet sit out of one round while the other teams play the packet.

Some high school competitions are run as after-school leagues rather than weekend tournaments; though this is a rarer practice, nothing prevents leagues from using good questions or being legitimate. Examples include the Virginia High School League Scholastic Bowl.

Questions

For examples of good quizbowl questions, there are many repositories of high school and college level questions available.

Resources

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