Re: correction

• From: koszul <no_reply_at_yahoogroups.com>
• Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2003 19:37:07 -0000
• Message-ID: <b7f2l3+nlp6_at_...>

--- In quizbowl_at_yahoogroups.com, plitvak_17 <no_reply_at_y...> wrote:


> The questions I referenced were from CC 2002, edited by Raj, not 
> Joon. It was, indeed, a timed tournament. The questions from this 
> year, edited by Joon, were untimed, a first for CC. (Although the
way 

It was timed, but rounds got through far fewer questions and it was
less fast-paced than NAQT, so I don't think it's quite a fair
comparison.
And furthermore, upon taking a cursory look at the rest of that packet
and one other, those lovely questions of mine you cited appear to be
in the upper range in terms of number of clues--the range looks to be
about 6-13, with most on the lower end.
Don't forget also that word count isn't the only determining factor
in how fast something can be read; to be comprehensible, questions
with as many specific names and keywords as the two you cited have to
be read a little slower than ones that have more natural sentences
that have to pause less frequently to mention names and such.  I
think a whole pack with questions like those two wouldn't go all that
fast.

None of this is meant as criticism of any Cardinal Classic (not even
the one in 1997 with all the delays for question copying); both
CC-2002 and ICT-2003 were excellent touranments, but differed
somewhat in the character of the questions.
There really is a tradeoff that has to be made between length, and
hence
number of clues, and speed/# of questions heard.  Many of those
questions from ICT
criticized here are simply casualties of that (RUR, assuming it
continued pyramidally after "Helena Glory"), even if some are also
duds (SOWETO,e.g.).  Every tournament has duds, and though I think
others have been closer to being dud-free (last year's ACF nats
springs to mind), I think the number of duds (given the question
length restrictions etc.) was acceptably low, that to me it didn't
detract too much from the wonderful diversity of questions on
interesting subjects that have not, to my knowledge, come up before. 
This latter is, I've always thought, NAQT's greatest strength.
Sorry for any unevenness in the line breaks, doing this in lynx works
quite poorly.  The fact that it's practically impossible to edit my
entered text also saves me from improving its currently sprawling
state.  Sorry about that, David