Re: Future of the Circuit

Stephen Webb <*sdwebb91984_at_sdwebb91984.yahoo.invalid*> · Tue, 22 Oct 2002 15:54:37 -0000

I honestly don't see how teams can gripe about having to write 
questions. Outside of getting a cultured and diverse intellectual 
background by reading everything put in front of you, writing 
questions is the best way to study for a tournament. And writing GOOD 
questions, too.

I love the idea of packet submission. For four years of high school 
you could count on SOMETHING by Frost, Poe, etc. to ALWAYS come up. 
With packet submission you let teams with differing bodies of 
knowledge create a much larger body of what is acceptable knowledge, 
thereby making the competition much more interesting. So many high 
school teams take home trophies because they memorize stuff that 
always comes up, without branching out into other, more difficult 
fields. I guarantee 99% of high school teams would not know who Lope 
de Vega is, even though he's probably the most prolific playwright 
ever. Why? Because when the gods of high school quiz bowl set down 
what is acceptable knowledge, ol' Lope got left out.

Granted, packet submission has its problems (fr'instance, I wrote the 
whole COTKU packet myself, and I don't know life sciences worth a 
shit.), but overall the benefits of playing on well-written packets 
submitted by other teams greatly outweighs the perceived problems.

Just the opinion of a noob,
Stephen Webb

--- In quizbowl_at_y..., thefool75 <no_reply_at_y...> wrote:
> 1.  One could certainly argue that a college sophomore with 4 years 
> of high school QB (at say NAQT or PACE tournaments or maybe Latin 
> Bowl (whatever it's called) as opposed to Beallness) has more 
> cumulative QB experience than Kelly, Subash, Raj or myself to name 
a 
> few examples.  Curiously, if I remember correctly limiting the game 
> to 6 years of experience would not remove any of the top scorers 
from 
> last year's NAQT ICT or ACF Nats.  (Not that a scoring title means 
> much--a player averaging 40 points a game who always gets her 
tossups 
> early in the question may well beat a player achieving 75 points a 
> game who always gets the tossup near the end--and this bears out in 
> actual playing as well).
> 
> 2.  I think it's taken me a couple years to be brought around to 
the 
> idea of writing easier tossups--though there's a point beyond which 
> accessibility can be taken too far--then you might as well just 
play 
> CBI.  Nevetheless, it's much easier to write good hard tossups than 
> quality "easy" ones.  In other words, probably the last tournaments 
> in the world that should be packet submission (at least by the 
> participants) are novice tourneys.  For example, at a novice 
> tournament, if a question is discussing an Aztec deity, you might 
as 
> well just buzz in with Quetzacoatl.  This rewards nothing.  Either 
A. 
> you need to have a packet difficulty set such that Tezcatlipoca, 
> Huitzilpoachtli, Coatlicue, Chalcuitlicue, Chantico, Tlaloc, and 
> Xolotl are possible answers, or B. the question needs to be written 
> perfectly so that someone without a fair amount of knowledge would 
> have no clue that an Aztec deity was being discussed until the end 
of 
> the question.
> 
> 3. Most people don't want to spend any time writing quality 
> questions, you want to ban most of the people willing to do it?
> 
> 4.  QB by its very nature is an elitist activity--we've seen a 
great 
> deal of growth in the past couple years--compare the Maize pages to 
a 
> couple years ago--and a huge growth in novice and trash 
tournaments.  
> I'm not sure that we could grow much more anyway without becoming 
> CBI.  What do you want?  To play on TV, groupies, regular coverage 
on 
> the sports page?  It's never going to happen.  Play because you 
love 
> it, not for recognition.  The day we write packets for the average 
> college student is the day 90% of all lit questions will be on 
> contemporary short stories plus Catcher in the Rye, all geography 
and 
> history will be Americana etc.  Thankfully, it's only a fiction 
that 
> our questions actually reflect what one learns in the first couple 
> years of college--it would be really scary if QB actually did.  
Don't 
> allow your schooling to interfere with your education--we ask 
> questions about things not in the freshman-sophomore curriculum 
> because it's assumed that as an intellectually curious human being 
> you actually read books (and I don't mean Benet's).  A misplaced 
> egalitarianism will destroy this game (it's not a sport--at least 
not 
> in any athletic sense--I always thought "mathlete" was the most 
> amusing term ever), not save it.
> 
> My 3 cents,
> nathan freeburg (who never played in high school or college--the 
same 
> is true of quite a few grad student players)