--- In quizbowl_at_yahoogroups.com, "Jordan Boyd-Graber" <jordanbg_at_y...> wrote: > Frankly, I think that Cardinal Classic suffered from using the Penn > Bowl questions. Last year, the questions were superb and well > balanced. The requirements were also unclear, and our questions about > the requirements went unanswered; we ended up writing a packet that > went unused. This is a poor introduction to quiz bowl for the players > new to the game (2/3 of the people who went from Tech). They expended > effort without reaping the reward of hearing their packet read. I share Jordan's opinion that Cardinal Classic would have done better to generate its own packet set as in the past. I think last year's Cardinal Classic had the best question set I've ever heard, and previous years have been uniformly excellent. It also seems like people on the West Coast (except perhaps the fine folks at Stanford) weren't really saved much effort this way; in the event 3 Berkeley teams wrote packets. I'm not sure how many Caltech teams wrote packets, but it sounds like a large fraction of the teams at Cardinal Classic ended up writing. I suppose without a packet swap Stanford would have to write more in-house material to cover nonwriting teams and playoffs, and perhaps that wasn't an option this year. In any case it was a shame, much like Berkeley's having to use COTKU packets for WIT--another fine west coast packet submission tournament that failed to be a west coast packet submission tournament this year. On another note, I think Caltech's questions were used, just not at Stanford--I think Stanford didn't use any of the west coast packets at the tournament (can anyone confirm/refute this?). Since there were 16 teams this worked out well, but it is nice to see people play on your team's packet. I hope west coast teams will act to reverse a seeming trend away from local packet submission tournaments--if I'm not mistaken, this year there have been 3 local packet submission tournaments that were either canceled (Ghetto Warz) or turned into mirrors (WIT, Cardinal Classic), and only one successful local packet submission tournament (Technophobia). -Seth
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0: Sat 12 Feb 2022 12:30:47 AM EST EST