BLaST II: packet guidelines

• From: grapesmoker <no_reply_at_yahoogroups.com>
• Date: Sun, 06 Feb 2005 23:19:00 -0000
• Message-ID: <cu68l4+rh0l_at_...>

Hello,

Last year's BLaST distribution seemed to work quite well for everyone,
so I am staying with it (with one minor exception). It is detailed
below.

Packet Distribution
Literature 5/5
Science 5/5
History 5/5
Religion/Mythology/Philosophy 2/2
Fine Arts 2/2
Social Science 1/1
Geography 1/1
Pop Culture (including sports) 1/1
Current Events 1/1 (new category)
Your Choice 1/1 (can be current events, general knowledge, or
anything else)

Half-Packet Distribution
Literature 2/3 or 3/2
Science 2/3 or 3/2
History 2/3 or 3/2
Religion/Mythology/Philosophy 1/1
Fine Arts 1/1
Social Science 0/1 or 1/0
Geography 0/1 or 1/0
Pop Culture (including sports) 0/1 or 1/0
Current Events 0/1 or 1/0
Your Choice 0/1 or 1/0 (can be current events, general
knowledge, or anything else)
(note: the half packet should have a total of 12/12)

Notes on the packet:
- The target difficulty is somewhere around WIT/Cardinal Classic
traditional difficulty levels. Your questions should be accessible and
pyramidal.
- No more than one question in any category should be a biography
question. Overall, your packet should not contain more than 3
biography questions, meaning tossups or 30-20-10s on some person; to
have a person as an answer to a bonus part is not considered
biogrpahy.
- Please be diverse in your selection of answer choices. In history,
for example, try to spread your answer choices around the globe and
out through time.
- Both your history and literature distributions should include at
least 1 question (out of 10), but no more than 3, on material coming
from the 20th century. Please distinguish between recent history (up
to the 80s or early 90s), and current events.
- Please make sure your current events questions are academic. That
is, they should ask about politically and culturally relevant
subjects. Celebrity gossip, for example, is not considered relevant
and belongs in the Pop Culture distribution.

Formatting guidelines:

Questions should be no shorter than 5 lines in 10 point Times New
Roman font and no longer than 7 lines. My preferred format is plain
text. Since I have no hope of getting everyone to use one standard
format, I would like plain text files because they are easiest to
adapt to whatever formatting scheme I choose. Packets should be
divided up by categories, not along tossup/bonus lines. For example:

Subject heading here.

Tossup text goes here.

        Answer: answer goes here

Bonus leadin.
Bonus part 1
        Answer: Answer 1
Bonus part 2
	Answer: Answer 2
Bonus part 3
	Answer: Answer 3

Questions should be sent to me at jerry_v at berkeley dot edu.

Jerry