Re: ACF and TRASH expansion

jpahk <*no_reply_at_yahoogroups.com*> · Tue, 05 Nov 2002 08:54:20 -0000

--- In quizbowl_at_y..., "Jason Mueller" <jcmpn7_at_m...> wrote:
> NAQT has a high school tourney and CBI has a high school program.  
> Why not ACF and TRASH?

i'm not ACF, so i don't speak for them, but what would the point of 
this be? ACF is not a money-making enterprise. it is run by college 
quizbowlers so that other college quizbowlers will have a format 
fitting certain criteria.

speaking of ACF, i really enjoyed the questions at the fall 
tournament. i'll add my voice to the chorus which has already sung 
out in praise of kelly and his herculean efforts. no tournament is 
perfect--probably no packet is even perfect, maybe no question--but 
there is a point past which we mortals can only gape in admiration. i 
would've liked to hear more physics questions and fewer physicist 
questions, but i understand that accessibility was the #2 priority 
(after question quality) and so i can understand why things were they 
way they were. on the other hand it did seem that there was a good 
amount of actual biology and chemistry (definitely a good thing), so 
i'm kind of curious about why the physics questions (on the whole) 
didn't turn out that way. i mean, at some basic level it's 
obviously "because that's what the teams chose to write about" but 
i'm wondering why that is. or maybe it's just my perception.

i'm glad somebody liked my jason tossup. it actually turned out to be 
the only tossup i wrote which was used in the tournament. (raj wrote 
most of our packet, and the other questions i wrote were repeats or 
near-repeats of question i heard in other packets.)

adam fine--i don't really feel like i need to respond to your 
criticisms of the questions since kelly has already done that, but 
you did claim that hemingway and faulkner are at least as important 
as poe in the history of american literature. while those two are 
both among my favorite writers, and i would have loved to hear 
questions about their works (had anybody chose to submit any--but no 
one subject can come up in every tournament, except maybe 
shakespeare) i have to disagree about their importance relative to 
poe's. not only is poe america's greatest lyric poet, he also 
invented the genres of mystery and science fiction. he pioneered 
symbolist poetry and presaged the new criticism. and there was this 
whole matter of the short story, which didn't really exist before poe 
and many of the finest examples of which are due to poe. basically, 
if there is one american writer who can be said to be the 
most "important" or "influential" it has to be edgar allan poe. so 
the fact that many people chose to write about him--and that all the 
things asked about him were pretty gettable--just underscores his 
place in the quizbowl canon (to say nothing of the canon of 
intellectual history).

also, unless i'm totally on crack, there was a bonus on hemingway 
short stories (you see how influential poe is? :). the killers, the 
short happy life of francis macomber, and hills like while elephants. 
i didn't just imagine it, right?

speaking of bonuses, the bonus difficulty was really not as extreme 
as people have been making it out to be. there was occasinally a 
challenging bonus part, but at the west-coast site, three teams had 
bonus conversion rates of 21+ points. berkeley A was over 25, and 
rightly so, since by any measure they're one of the country's best 
teams. but stanford was at 24 and berkeley B almost 22. so there 
really couldn't have been an impossible bonus part in each question.

joon