This is the announcement for ACF Fall 2006. ACF Fall will be held on the weekend of Saturday, November 4, 2006. Hosts have the option to run the tournament on Sunday, November 5 instead of Saturday if football, other tournaments, or other conflicts make doing so preferable. Date announcements from each host will follow once host bids are awarded. On that note, please mail Eric Kwartler at ekwartler at gmail dot com if you are interested in hosting. As always, we are looking for hosts in every region of the United States and Canada where active quizbowl teams exist. Please get your host bids in by April 30 so that we may announce the hosting lineup before the end of the spring semester. GENERAL PRINCIPLES FOR WRITING ACF FALL PACKETS ACF Fall is designed to be a very accessible tournament and an enjoyable introduction to the game for newer players. To help meet this goal, packet writers should keep question difficulty low and question quality high. An ideal packet in terms of question difficulty, question structure, and formatting may be found at http://www.hsquizbowl.org/acf-model.doc . Consult this packet for all your questions about formatting, and feel free to contact Eric Kwartler if any of your questions remain unanswered. For question structure: note the dense, specific, helpful clues packed into each question, the structuring of each bonus to give 10 points to most teams, 20 to many, and 30 to the best, and the selection of widely known tossup answers with many interesting and useful clues available. For this tournament, always err on the side of easier if you are unsure about the difficulty of a particular question. You may also find it useful to review Subash Maddipotti's Ten Tips For Question Writing located here: http://www.dpo.uab.edu/~paik/acf/subash.html as well as examine packets from previous ACF Fall tournaments, freely available on the ACF site, for examples of the question style we wish to see. Keep in mind two important points: As noted in the above document, you should omit useless information such as “His intermittent surrealist depictions and use of vivid color belied the realism and monochromatic pigments that the public associated with him.†This sort of knowledge is of course very important to fully understanding whatever painter we’re talking about in a classroom context, but phrased in that manner, it simply does not help anyone in an ACF match get the question, no matter how much he or she knows about art. Make sure every clue in your tossups is a helpful and uniquely identifying piece of information about the answer. Second, keep your questions INTERESTING as well as easy. For example, a tossup on Gabriel Garcia Marquez that starts off talking about the plots of some of his lesser works, moves on to better-known events from his major novels, and finally asks for “this Columbian author of One Hundred Years of Solitude,†is always better than a question which just lists titles in descending order of difficulty. A tossup which simply offers irrelevant biographical trivia about Garcia Marquez is not usable at all. PACKET SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS A and B teams from schools who played any ACF tournament in the 04-05 or 05-06 academic years are required to submit packets as described below. The discount/penalty schedule is as follows: Submitted by September 9: -$50 Submitted by September 23: -$20 Submitted by October 7: $0 Submitted by October 14 +$20 Submitted by October 21 +$50 No packet submitted by October 21: Dropped from tournament Formatting penalty: If your packet deviates significantly from the formatting guidelines, you will incur a $20 penalty on top of any other fees or discounts. C, D, and further teams, or any teams from schools who did not play any ACF tournament in the 04-05 or 05-06 academic years, are not required to submit packets. However, if those teams wish to gain experience writing and get a discount, you have this option: Submitted by October 7 -$50 Submitted by October 21 -$20 No packet submitted by October 21: We will assume you do not want to submit your optional packet, and there will be no packet discount or penalty factored into your entry fee. Formatting penalty: If your packet deviates significantly from the formatting guidelines, you will incur a $5 penalty, taken away from your discount. Further information on costs, such as the base tournament entry fee, will be determined and announced by each tournament host. Packets must be submitted by 11:59 PM Central Time on the specified days. Packets should not be exposed to anyone outside of the specific team that is writing the packet; in all likelihood, your school’s A team will play on the packet written by your school’s B team, et cetera, so it is imperative that questions be kept blind to all competitors. The packet distribution for this year’s tournament is the same as last year’s: Literature 5/5 History 5/5 Science 5/5 Religion, Mythology and Philosophy 3/3 Fine Arts 3/3 Social Science 1/1 Geography 1/1 Trash, current events, or your choice 1/1 Total: 24/24 More specific requirements for each category are as follows: Literature 5/5: 3/3 should be American or British Literature, while 2/2 should be European or World Literature. Out of the 5/5, 1/1 should be on poetry and 1/1 should be on drama. Please be sure to vary geographically within Europe and the rest of the world, and no more than three total questions should come from any given century. History 5/5: 2/2 american, 2/2 european, 1/1 nonwestern. No more than 1 from the same European country or nonwestern civilization. At least 1/1 European must be post-1500. Of your 10 total history questions, no more than 3 should be primarily on military history. Of your 10 total history questions, no more than 3 may be primarily about any one century. Questions to which the answer is not the name of a battle or a person are encouraged. Science 5/5: 1/1 from each of the big three sciences (Biology, Chemistry and Physics), and 2/2 your choice (including minor science categories and science biography/history). No more than 2/2 total should come from any given area of science. Religion, Mythology and Philosophy 3/3: 1/1 from each of the three subcategories. There should be no more than 1 question each on Judeo-Christian Religion, Classical Mythology and Ancient Philosophy. Fine Arts 3/3: 1/1 Painting, 1/1 Classical Music and 1/1 sculpture, architecture, ballet, opera or jazz (or any combination of the above). Social Science: No more than one question should come from any given area of social science. For the purpose of this tournament, questions about notable court cases which focus mainly on legal reasoning rather than historical circumstance may be counted as social science. More historically based law questions should still go under history. Geography: Do not write both questions on the same kind of political or physical feature, such as rivers, bodies of water, mountains, cities etc. Also, please do not write both questions on the same area of the world. All packets should be submitted to ekwartler at gmail dot com. Packets must be submitted as .doc files (Microsoft Word or equivalent), and the filename should reflect the team that wrote the packet (as in, Chicago H.doc). The text should be in size 10 Times New Roman font. Do not number your questions or use tabs or any other mechanism that can trigger auto-formatting in Word except for smart quotes and apostrophes. Do not put page breaks between blocks of questions. Please sort your questions by category. The answers to tossups should be preceded by "ANSWER: " and should have the required portions in bold and underlined. Please do not use bold or underlining in any part of any question that is not the answer. Bonus parts should be preceded by [point value] , and answers should be treated as specified above for tossups. At the top of the packet please write the name of the institution you represent and the names of the packet authors in bold, as well as the site of the tournament you plan on attending. Don’t forget whether to note that you are your school’s A team, B team, etc, if applicable. Remember that if you don’t meet these formatting requirements, we will charge you a $20 dollar formatting penalty. Once again, please consult http://www.hsquizbowl.org/acf-model.doc for an example of the formatting (and question content) which we seek. That is what your submitted packet should look like. After the tournament, the ACF Fall editors will be offering feedback on packets if requested. Teams that would like feedback should say so in their packet-submission email. IMPORTANT PACKET DON’TS We have two new rules for packet submission this year that all teams should take careful note of. 1) Wikipedia rule: It is the considered opinion of the ACF Fall 2006 editors that Wikipedia is not a reliable source for meeting the stringent standards of factual accuracy which quizbowl questions must maintain. Therefore, we will not accept any questions written out of Wikipedia. If we find questions in your packet that are obviously written from a Wikipedia article, you will be asked to rewrite those particular questions from more reliable sources, and your packet will not be counted as submitted until the rewrites are complete. Using Wikipedia as a starting point for a question is ok, but it cannot be your only source, and all information gleaned from any Wikipedia article must be cross-checked with an established source. If you are having trouble finding good places to look up information for questions, please contact any of the editors and we will be happy to help you. 2) Plagiarism and recycling rule: Plagiarism of any kind in your packet submissions for this tournament is absolutely unnacceptable. In general, anything that is considered plagiarism for coursework at your school will be considered plagiarism in your submitted packet. In particular, note that our concept of plagiarism includes but is not limited to: -Lifting wording directly from Wikipedia, Britannica, or any encyclopedia, webpage, book, or other reference source without attribution -Taking questions or parts of questions from previously existing quizbowl packets Teams caught plagiarizing will have their packets rejected and will not be given the opportunity to write a replacement. Possible actions which we may take against such teams may include but are not limited to: -publicly identifying them -barring such teams from playing ACF Fall 2006 -charging such teams significant financial penalties in order to play ACF Fall 2006 Just don’t do it. While less serious than plagiarism, the following practices are also prohibited, and will result in your packet being rejected and your team being required to write a replacement if they wish to receive credit for a packet submission. -Resubmitting questions that were previously submitted to an ACF event, even if they were not used -Resubmitting questions that were previously submitted to ANY tournament, even if they were not used. You do not know who may have assisted the editors of other tournaments you submitted to, and cannot guarantee that the people who saw your questions are not playing in ACF Fall 2006. Hopefully there will be no such unpleasantness and we can all enjoy some great questions and great competition. Looking forward to receiving all of your packets, Eric Kwartler, Matt Weiner, Ray Luo, and Billy Beyer Tournament editors, ACF Fall 2006
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