Editing/Fields of Expertise (was Applause to Joon)

Viking Squirrel <*geertgen22_at_ratatosk22.yahoo.invalid*> · Sun, 13 Apr 2003 07:27:53 -0000

Josh Allen wrote:
> 
> In conclusion, chill out.  Sure, go ahead and complain about the 
> answers.  I too have trouble that a tournament that has, as it's 
> aim, to have most of its questions answered, would ask about 
> something most people have studied, like the Peloppenesian War 
> (that's my spelling and I'm sticking to it).  But don't complain 
> about your field.

The problem is that the NAQT ICT (and ACF Nationals) sets should be 
held to a higher standard than any old invitational tournament or 
NAQT invitational set.  These are supposed to be the best questions 
of the year; the set on which the organizations concentrate the most 
effort.  Players should expect the highest quality questions, 
including in their field of expertise. 

I can understand and expect to hear a decent number of poor questions 
at invitationals, because there you have inexperienced writers and 
editors.  As Stan mentioned, you also have writers who use submitted 
questions as a study method to learn material outside of their strong 
areas.  There's nothing terribly wrong with that, as the stakes are 
pretty low.

NAQT, however, is supposed to represent a cross-section of some of 
the most experienced writers and editors in quizbowl.  So I have to 
ask:  why are so many of these suspect questions getting through?  
Doesn't NAQT have an editor for each subject area?  Hopefully, these 
editors would have filtered out some of the lesser questions we heard 
last weekend.  (To be fair, perhaps they did just that, and some of 
the questions submitted to them may have been much worse.  Or if 
there is one editor in place per subject -- admittedly I know little 
about the inner workings of NAQT's editing system -- individual 
editors could be quite overworked or have some holes within their 
field of expertise).

Subash and Zeke mentioned that one way of making ICT questions better 
is for a greater number of experienced players to write some.  In 
addition, I would suggest allowing retired, experienced qb veterans 
to look over the questions, which would put in place another level of 
editing.  I think that both the ICT and ACF Nationals (which is 
nothing against Raj Bhan, as he did an excellent job last year, and I 
expect the same this year) would benefit from having as many eyes on 
the questions and possible, in order to catch and edit out the weaker 
submissions.

Thanks,
Adam