Raj Duwalia wrote: "Sorry, one more added comment. While I thought the questions were a very good NAQT set, there were a number of tossups which had lead-ins which were too easy for the topic." Is it just me, or is this comment kind of funny? It mentions, almost as an afterthought, the most damning of the many flaws in this weekend's tournament: in packet after packet, the best players in the country were treated to incompetently written tossups that began with silly giveaways. I know I'm going to annoy some people by writing this message, but I hope that someone at NAQT is listening. Looking over my notes from the weekend, I see tossup after tossup that should have been rewritten. A Popul Vuh tossup that began with the phrase "Council Book." An R.U.R. question that mentions the play's two most important characters in the first line. A John Cage tossup that begins with a reference to the I Ching and proceeds to tell players about the prepared piano, at a bizarrely early point in the question. An Appalachian Spring question that begins with the German title "Springtime in Pennsylvania." A Protestant Ethic question that mentions "calling" and "Puritan" in the first line. A Mandelbrot set question that begins with an allusion to the Julia set. A triangle inequality question that can be answered almost instantly by anyone who knows the definition of a metric space. An atrociously bad tossup on "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" that begins - amazingly enough - by talking about rivers! The list goes on and on... I could easily double or triple my "bad question count" if I felt like taking the time, but I think you get the idea. I suspect that some of you are shaking your heads as you read this: "But I didn't know that 'Popul Vuh' means 'Council Book'!", you might be saying. "Is it really a big deal if the R.U.R. question mentioned its two main characters early on?" you might ask. "Does anyone actually read that play anyway?" The problem is that the initial clues in ICT-level questions should (in general) be answerable only by the most knowledgeable players at the country's largest national championship - a test that NAQT failed again and again. Sometimes an answer was fairly easy and accessible, with a complete giveaway early on (Protestant Ethic), and sometimes the answer was slightly more challenging (Popul Vuh) but the initial clue was just as obvious. (Even if a lot of the people on this group don't know the etymology of the name "Popul Vuh," I'd be willing to bet that a disproportionate number of the people who got this tossup buzzed in really early.) In all these cases, however, NAQT failed to achieve something remotely resembling pyramidal structure. The questions at the ICT frequently broke two of the cardinal rules of good question-writing: never begin a tossup by mentioning a book's main characters, and never begin a science tossup with a straightforward definition of the answer. A lot of people at the tournament agreed with me about the questions, but some of them seem resigned to the problem. (I think that's why no one else has posted a complaint yet.) Others even thought that NAQT had written a lot of bad questions intentionally: I had conversations with several people who thought that NAQT intentionally began tossups with bad clues to increase the number of powers and make the game more "exciting." I personally think that a wide variety of people work for NAQT, ranging from CBI retreads to competent and dedicated (but not outstanding) players to a handful of talented and capable writers and editors. Unfortunately, the least competent people have a really big impact on the company's final product, and NAQT's highest priority has never been to produce a fantastic ICT. I did have fun this weekend, though. The fun occasionally - very occasionally - came in the form of good questions: the tossups on Oliver Otis Howard and the Dread Pirate Roberts spring to mind, though there were more. On other rare occasions, the fun came from the quality of play: Subash's dominating performance was amazing to watch, and I have no doubt that it would have been just as impressive on better-structured questions. More often, however, the weekend's fun resulted from witnessing the (dys)functioning of a truly dreadful playoff system, from getting the chance to mock CBIish questions with answers like "pro bono," and from revelling in the insanity that surrounds everyone's favorite NAQT personality, Samer Ismail. That last point bears repeating. Whether he was whining (in front of teams!) about the best questions in the packet he was reading, informing players of why their negs were incorrect (while the clock was running!), or writing his moderator statistics on the blackboard, the esteemed Mr. Ismail was a wonder to behold. (We know you're a fast reader, Samer: you don't need to keep track on the blackboard of how many tossups you've read each round, along with how many seconds were left on the clock.) Again and again, Samer seemed determined to convince the circuit that he was the smartest person in the room and the best moderator in his bracket. His job would have been easier if the science had been better edited, or if players could understand what he was saying when he read. Pomposity, thy name is Ismail! So I left this year's ICT with a mixture of amusement, bemusement, disgust, and disappointment. I think I've described the first three emotions pretty clearly, but I don't want to underemphasize the last. I can never understand how it is that such a talented group of people can produce such a crappy set of questions. Partly, as I wrote above, NAQT isn't a uniformly competent group: for every R. Hentzel writing interesting and competent questions, there's a Matt Bruce flooding the circuit with crap. Partly, I think that NAQT is isolated from the best players on the circuit, so they don't really know what people think of their questions. And partly, I think NAQT might consider its questions "good enough": if only a few people will know the first clue on that awful Popul Vuh question, then why change it? After all, it's not as if the questions allowed a crap team to sneak into the top three. That was the format's job!
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