--- In quizbowl_at_yahoogroups.com, madelman1 <no_reply_at_y...> wrote: > Very little of it is on ACF Nationals; most of it is from playing in > ACF-style tournaments (which I know is not the same thing as ACF) and > listening to ACF questions in practice. Ok, I think I see where part of the problem lies. If you're an incoming freshman and in practice your team reads ACF questions from bygone years, I suspect you might be a little turned off. Those questions are tough and probably not appropriate for players just starting out in collegiate QB. Furthermore, it lends creedence to the "ACF is hard" stereotype. Instead, ACF Fall is better for reading in practice. Unfortunately, due to circumstances detailed in my previous post, there will probably only be 3 official ACF tournaments every year, which leaves only a couple years of ACF Fall to play in practice for now. As for mACF tournaments like Caltech's Quesadilla, Berkeley's WIT, and Princeton's Buzzerfest, those questions will be as hard as the teams that submit them want it. There's only so much an editor can do about it. I think you'd find that Quesadilla and WIT, to use two that I'm familiar with, are quite reasonable in their difficulty and appropriate for all kinds of players. Buzzerfest, in my experience, has been somewhat harder, closer to ACF Regionals perhaps. I only mention those tournaments because I've played in the first two for four years running and we read a lot of Buzzerfest in practice. Cardinal Classic is also very accessible, though the questions are somewhat shorter than in the other three. It still conforms to the ACF philosophy for the most part, however. > Fair enough. It's just that in my experience I have never seen this; > the reason that I have seen is that people think that the questions > are inaccessible. The key phrase here is "people think that the questions are inaccessible," but a lot of that thinking might be based on older questions that were written before there was a revision in the ACF attitude towards accessibility. I've said enough about that above. > By the same token, if it actually is too hard, people won't play it. > There seem to be a lot of people who think this. Now, if ACF doesn't > want to make their questions easier to accommodate the masses, that's > fine, but if that is the case, people should stop pretending that ACF > is accessible to everyone. But ACF *does* want to make their questions easier! Just not all of them. It's not reasonable to expect everyone to play at ACF Nats. That's ok, not everyone goes to the NBA playoffs either. It's this perception, which persists despite evidence to the contrary, that I find disheartening. I have no role in the organizational structure of ACF but I will guarantee you that next year's regionals will be easier than this year's because the people in charge of editing will take into account the feedback from this year's regionals. > No, I might not pay $7 dollars to see it if someone said that it was > awful. But my decision would be different if one person said that it > was awful followed by two people jumping in and vociforously saying > that it wasn't awful at all. At that point, I would definitely try > to make my own decision. But you're right, some people might make > their decision based on what other people tell them about ACF; I just > haven't seen it. I think people won't tell you necessarily what their opinions are based on, and in many clubs there are no countervailing voices to the "ACF = hard" opinion. Many people also don't read this board on a regular basis (I'm sure this probably goes for much of California QB, for example) so they don't really get an alternative viewpoint. I reiterate: ACF is about the philosophy of question writing. It emphasizes academic, pyramidal, well-written questions. It's not about what goes in the canon or about what (academic) answer choices are acceptable. The sooner people understand this, the sooner they will drop the stereotypes and participate more actively in ACF and mACF tournaments. Jerry
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0: Sat 12 Feb 2022 12:30:48 AM EST EST