Academic Hallmarks
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| President or CEO | Pat Jewell | |||
| Location: | Wycliffe, OH | |||
| Status | Open | |||
Academic Hallmarks, abbreviated as AH and sometimes known as The Great Auk or AUK for its mascot, is a software publishing and question writing company historically based in Durango, Colorado, and now based in Wycliffe, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. They supply decidedly non-pyramidal questions to a number of invitational tournaments. From 1983 until 2013 they organized the online Knowledge Master Open competition, and provided all questions for Knowledge Bowl until the late 2010s.
Question quality
AH historically produced questions in which no attempt at following "good quizbowl" principles like pyramidality or avoiding trivia was made. Many questions for the high school sets relied on elementary-school-level knowledge of English grammar and deliberately appeared to try to mislead players as to what is even being asked using a variety of swerves and hoses as well as unclear lead-ins and extraneous information. Questions that consisted entirely of lists of various things that players had to identify as well as quotes were common. Wild difficulty swings from question-to-question, limited answer lines, extremely short questions, and confusing syntax befuddled players and easily led to bizarre match outcomes.
A uniquely bad quizbowl feature of AH sets consisted of questions in the form of puns and riddles in which the player must provide the punchline for made-up limericks and ditties in order to "answer" the question. Many questions year-to-year were often either near-verbatim repeats of questions from previous years or on the same pet topics of the author's personal interest, often involving things having to do with Colorado or nearby areas.
See a sample Academic Hallmarks packet from 2010.
There was a marked improvement in question quality after the company was sold in the late 2010s, though they are still not widely considered on par with modern Quizbowl standards.
History
Former School district superintendent Bill Brown founded Academic Hallmarks in 1982 after working with Colorado Knowledge Bowl for many years. In the late 2010s, Brown sold the company to Pat Jewell, a longtime coach in Northeast Ohio. AH enjoyed a close relationship with Questions Unlimited after the sale, supplying them with questions for several events and fulfilling all their technological needs. Immediately after the sale, the state Knowledge Bowl organizations in Minnesota, Colorado, and Washington switched to Question Authorities, which was created by the former coach from Grand Junction.
Events using AH questions
Academic Hallmarks events have always had very little overlap with other Quizbowl competitions, making it very difficult to determine their reach. AH had considerable influence on circuits in Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Minnesota, and South Dakota, with pockets of AH questions usage in Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, New Hampshire and several other states. Academic Hallmarks has or had international clients in Syria, Egypt, Russia, China, and Germany, as they market to international schools.
A list of AH "pristine question users" formerly posted on their website and maintained until 2012 was generally inaccurate. It is unclear if a number of other tournaments and leagues that use AH questions are using pristine questions or instead "custom" question sets of questions from previous years of AH, which are all still sold from AH and updated yearly in a large database. For an example of such a list, see 2012-2013 Academic Hallmarks events.
Later, an events list was posted after the sale to Jewell, with the new list being much shorter than the 2000s-era original. [1]