2003 ACF Nationals Stats

quizbowlpostmodernist <*no_reply_at_yahoogroups.com*> · Thu, 21 Aug 2003 02:47:05 -0000

Josh Clanton of Georgia Tech was kind enough to give me the 
scoresheets from ACF Nationals and the ACF people were kind enough to 
put the questions on their website, so I now have data on question 
difficulty and such, including ranking players by performance in 
specific categories (which I will eventually reveal).

I'll start off with the difficult tossups (haven't analyzed bonuses 
yet). There were ten rooms, except in round 15, when there were eight 
games played, and rounds 16 and 17, which were the finals.

Caveat: The data is only as good as the quality of scoresheets. They 
seem pretty clear. So far the only error detected is that a neg seems 
to be credited to Michigan A on tossup 20 in round 8 (Samuel), but 
the neg is not attributed to a specific person. 

Not also that more than one at the tournament may have know the 
answer, but additional people may have negged, been on a bye, or been 
beat by the only other person to know a rare answer.

The following tossups went unanswered:
Round 1, tossup 5, Gilman reagent
Round 8, tossup 5, Ferrell Cells
Round 14, tossup 2, Multatuli

The following tossups were answered by one person:
Round 3, tossup 12, cisplatin (Trey Morris of Texas A&M)
Round 9, tossup 4, Sacred Cantatas (Adam Kemezis of Michigan A)
Round 9, tossup 11, The Phoenician Women (Dan of UNF)
Round 10, tossup 5, Meyndert Hobbema (Adam Fine of Maryland)
Round 12, tossup 13, Mysore Wars (Vik Vaz of Harvard)
Round 14, tossup 4, Bhima (Paco of Harvard)

The following tossups were answered by only two people:
Round 1, tossup 16, Legendre (Matt Reece of Chicago A, Raj Dhuwalia 
of Florida)
Round 3, tossup 11, Diary of a Superfluous Man, (Evelyn of Cornell, 
David Farris of Berkeley)
Round 5, tossup 4, vocalise, (Yvonne of UNF, Elizabeth of Yale)
Round 7, tossup 9, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Marcus 
Ballinger of Emory B, Jon Pennington of Berkeley)
Round 12, tossup 14, Ancient Society (Kelly McKenzie of Kentucky, 
Ezequiel Berdichevsky of Michigan A)
Round 13, tossup 5, Vedanta (Susan Ferrari of Chicago A, Paul Litvak 
of Michigan A)

The tournament had 300 tossups over 15 rounds. 100 were anwered in 
ten rooms, 43 were answered in nine rooms, 50 in eight rooms, 35 in 
seven rooms, 21 in six rooms, 17 in five rooms, 11 in four rooms, 8 
in three rooms, 6 in two rooms, 6 in one room, and 3 in zero rooms.  
Given that there were ten rooms in 14 rounds and 8 rooms in 1 round, 
there were 78.7% of tossups answered. In the intial round robin (the 
first 11 rounds), 80% of tossups were answered.

The most negged upon tossups were: 
Eight negs [round-tossup# (correct answer-# who got it right)]: 4-13 
(Lucan-6), 4-14 (Sakhmet-6), 11-2 (Starbuck-7)
Seven negs: 3-8(Antigonus-6), 5-4 (vocalise-2), 6-7 (organ of Corti-
3), 10-9 (kobold-8)
Six negs: 2-16 (gibberelins-9), 7-1 (insulin-8), 10-17 (RAND 
Corporation-6), 11-7 (Orestes), 11-19 (Conchobar-4)

For those curious, Nathan Freeburg went 4-2 on those tossups, of 
which he wrote one.

Contact me at quizbowlpostmodernist at yahoo dot com if you have any 
private comments or suggestions. 

Anthony, less of a waste of bandwidth than qbhaddockgirl