Announcing Rice's First College Tournament

• From: r2aslet <no_reply_at_yahoogroups.com>
• Date: Sun, 24 Nov 2002 07:22:00 -0000
• Message-ID: <arpumo+b2g5_at_...>

Rice University Quiz Bowl is pleased to announce that it will be
hosting its first college tournament on March 22, 2003.  Called the
Rice Acabowl, it will be a humanities/social sciences only NAQT style
packet submission tournament.  (That is, no math or science questions
whatsoever.)  We felt that Rice's position as a well-known science and
engineering university would make it the perfect venue to host such an
event.

The relevant information is as follows:

Name: The Rice Acabowl: Because Math and Science Suck!
Date: March 22, 2003
Format: Untimed NAQT style, 10 question rounds
Fee Schedule: $100 base fee per team
             -$10 per additional team (i.e. 2nd team base fee $90, 3rd
team base fee $80)
             -$10 per working buzzer system (max of 2 per school)
             -$10 per experienced moderator (max of 2 per school)
            -$30 if packet turned in by Super-Early deadline (December
21, 2002)
             -$15 if packet turned in by Early deadline (January 18,
2003)
             -$0 if packet turned in by Regular deadline (February 1,
2003)
             +$5 per day packet is not submitted after the regular
deadline
Minimum Fee: $50 per team 

Question Distribution:

History 5/5
Religion/Myth/Philosophy 4/4
Social Science (law, economics, anth, sociology, etc.) 4/4
Fine Arts 4/4
Literature 4/4
Your Choice 4/4
Total: 25/25

We are initially limiting the field to 15 teams and will reserve spots
based on whose packets we receive first.  Schools may bring a maximum
of three teams.  Each team must write a packet which is blind to all
other teams including those from the same school.  Each team may have
a maximum of one graduate student.  Currently, we plan on running a
round robin among all teams.

For the Your Choice category, we require that the questions you choose
to write not be science related (unless the scientist you're writing
the question on had some significant humanities/social scientific
achievements).  The Your Choice cannot be sports or pop culture
related and should fall under one of the topics listed above. 
Questions on current literary, social science, arts, etc. events are
acceptable.  You may distribute the Your Choice questions however you
like (9/9 total history questions is fine).  We request that you
spread your questions across time periods and geographic areas and
that no more than 25% of your questions have people as answers.

We are shooting for a NAQT invitational packet level of difficulty. 
Approximately 80% of tossups and 50% of bonuses should be answerable
if heard completely.  All bonuses should be worth 30 points.  No
spelling or FAQTP tossups.  Tossups should not exceed 6 lines, bonuses
15.  Creative questions will get you kisses from the packet editor. 
All rights reserved.  No purchase necessary.  1.5% annual APR.  Void
where prohibited.

We encourage out of state teams to attend and will give them
preference for spots over in-state teams should conflicts occur.

Interested teams should contact me, el director del torneo, at saslett
at rice dot edu with the words "Rice College Tournament" in the
subject line of the e-mail and indicate whether they would prefer
awards in the form of trophies, cash, or gift certificates.  Completed
packets should be sent in .rtf format both to me and VP Michael
Friedman-- mwfriedman at yahoo dot com.

As we get closer to the tournament date, registrations and additional
tournament info will be posted to our brand-spanking new website:
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~quiz (still very much a work in progress). 
Unlike those for certain other tournaments <cough cough>, we promise
it will be promptly updated.

--Stephen Aslett