Having read every round this past weekend at our portion of ACF Fall, personally, I didn't see any glaring problems with the packets. There weren't really any problems that shouldn't be expected. Editors are human, and given that I think Kelly did a bang up job on this weekend's questions. There may have been a couple of questions where pronunciation guides have been helpful (pretty much all the questions in the Indiana packet for instance), but I think that should be the responsibility of the person/team submitting the packet. I also noticed the missing therd clue on the Classification bonus, but it was no big deal. I just made a decision. There were actually three parts, none of which were really any harder than the others, so I just said they were all worth 10. No biggie. the David bonus was definitely jacked up, but it didn't matter in my room. The team wasn't able to answer with the right answer or what was on the paper. This kind of oversight is bound to happen. The fact is that kelly read through at least 280+ tossups and their associated boni when editing this tournament. Sure, oversights will occur. On the whole, I'm surprised there weren't more and I commend kelly for his work. The packets were on the whole a pleasure to read, and overall, I think they would have been a blast to play too. Just my opinion. Patrick Riser --- In quizbowl_at_y..., mac4731 <no_reply_at_y...> wrote: > As I swore I wouldn't get dragged into the post-tournament > discussion, and as I have dinner plans to attend to shortly, I'll try > to be brief in answering the points that Mr. Fine mentioned in his > post. > > 1) The use of five of my packets out of the 15 (not 14) that were > sent out: I received in the ballpark of around 25 packets from teams > around the country. Of these, at least half were immediately beyond > the point of salvaging in their entirety, usually due to incredibly > bad writing technique, inapproprate difficulty, or a combination of > the two. That left me with about 12 packets, of which all were used > in some form this weekend. Believe me when I tell you that I squeezed > everything possible out of those packets that I could without > seriously endangering the overall quality and difficulty of the > tournament. I really didn't like to have to use as many of my own > questions as I had to, and especially didn't like having to write > more questions on the last day of editing just to fill out the set, > but there was no way to get around it. Had I used more of what was > sent to me, I undoubtedly would have been criticized for question > quality, so to me that fact that five rounds of high quality > questions were written by me was definitely the better route to go. > > 2) Recycling of topics/underrepresentation of topics: Yes, some > topics can up multiple times, and yes, some topics (Hemingway, > Faulkner) didn't come up at all. The reason is because I only had my > questions and those sent to me to work with, and these were the > topics asked about. I did as much as I could with my own > contributions to the set to be a broad as possible, but some things > just couldn't be gotten to. As far as I can see it, my options were > to 1) do what I did, and get blasted for it, 2) use inferior > questions from sets that really should not be used, and get blasted > for the low quality, as you would undoubtedly do, or 3) write even > more of my own questions, and get blasted for that. I thought the > way I chose (using every question I could from those who submitted > rounds) was the best of the options. > > 3) Pyramid structure: Yes, like every tournament that has ever > existed, there were a few questions in which the editor had a > different idea than others as to which clues were easier than others. > On the whole, I think that I got it right, with the exception of a > handful of examples, and that pyramid structure in this set was > better than most tournaments. I'm human; give me a break if I got a > few of them wrong. > > 4) Factual errors: See the above human comment. I think this > tournament set had fewer factual errors than just about any > tournament you'll find, but 100% accuracy is beyond my powers. > > 5) Formatting: This is news to me. I sent the sets out the Sunday > night before the tournament, and asked each of the hosts to look > through it and tell me if there was anything that needed to be fixed, > and they were. During my time reading at Knoxville, I didn't hear of > a single problem experienced by any of the moderators, and I didn't > notice any glaring problems with the readability of the text. If this > really was a problem, I'd like for anyone who was actually reading > this weekend to let me know, as I'd like to fix those for next year. > > In closing, I'd like to say something about constructive criticism. > To me this implies that the one doing to criticism provide at least > an idea of how these problems should be fixed. I would encourage all > of you reading this to return to the above 5 sections, and ask, what > could I have done to improve the situation, and if you have any > possible solutions, please let me know, as I am planning to do this > again next year. To me, the criticisms in Mr. Fine's post were > directed at things were the result of unavoidable human imperfection > or things that could only be changed by creating greater problems. > Any posts or emails proposing constructive solutions will be read > with great interest by me. > > Kelly
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