Terrapin Invitational Tournament

TIT XXII Announcement

Terrapin Invitational Tournament XXII
Saturday, January 19th, 2008
University of Maryland College Park

ANNOUNCEMENT:

The Maryland Academic Quiz Team is pleased to announce the 22nd 
annual Terrapin Invitational Tournament for Saturday, January 19th, 
2008 to be held at our College Park, MD campus.  By reading this 
message you are "invited" to this "invitational" tournament.  This 
packet-submission "regular season" academic tournament will be using 
the same questions as the 2008 MLK Tournament being held at the 
University of Michigan.  Also mirroring this tournament is the 
University of Missouri at Rolla.  Any other schools interested in 
mirroring this tournament should contact Mike Bentley at 
mike000_at_....

Jonathan Magin will be the head editor for this tournament, and other 
editors include Charles Meigs, Ray Luo, Andy Kravis, Mike Bentley and 
Jeremy Eaton.

Also look out for a forthcoming announcement of the return of the 
Chris McCray Tournament for Academic Excellence (a pop culture 
tournament), which will be held on Sunday, January 20th, 2008.  That 
tournament will be a mirror of the Ann B. Davis tournament at 
Michigan.

PRICING:

+$100 - Base Fee
-$50 - Packet submitted by Saturday, November 24th.
-$25 - Packet submitted by Saturday, December 8th.
+$0 - Packet submitted by Saturday, December 22nd.
+$50 - Packet submitted by Saturday, December 29th.
+$100 - No packet submitted.
-$5 - Buzzer discount per school.
-$10 - Competent moderator discount per school (can be applied to 
Chris McCray tournament on Sunday).
-$20 - Travel discount per team for coming more than 200 miles one 
way as judged by Google Maps.
+$10 - Formatting penalty for formatting your questions incorrectly 
(see formatting section below).
-$20 - Prize for the best unedited packet received in general, and by 
the best Division II (first two years play quizbowl) only team.

Minimum Fee Per Team: $40.

PACKET GUIDELINES:

Distribution (26/26):
5/5 History (1/1 US, 1/1 European, 1/1 Ancient, 1/1 World, 1/1 Your 
Choice [please do not write both of these on the same subject])
5/5 Literature (1/1 American, 1/1 British, 1/1 European, 1/1 World, 
and 1/1 Any of the above; try to include at least 1/1 drama, 1/1 
novels, and 1/1 poetry)
5/5 Science (1/1 Physics, 1/1 Chemistry, 1/1 Biology, 1/1 Minor 
Science like Computer Science, Non-Computational Math, Geology, 
Astronomy, Earth Science, Engineering, etc., 1/1 Your Choice)
1/1 Extra History, Literature, Science (please do not write on the 
same category for both the tossup and bonus)
3/3 RMP (2/2 Religion and Mythology, 1/1 Philosophy)
3/3 Fine Arts (1/1 Visual Fine Arts like Painting and Sculpture, 1/1 
Classical Music, 1/1 Your Choice or other like Architecture, Artistic 
Film, Dance, Opera or more painting / music.)
2/2 Social Science (Economics, Sociology, Psychology, Anthropology, 
Linguistics, etc.)
2/2 Your choice (any additional questions above), pop culture, common 
link, general knowledge, current events, misc.

Please vary all your questions by time period, region of the world 
(when applicable) and genre.  Also vary the type of question you 
ask.  For example, do not write 5 literature tossups on 19th century 
British novelists.  A better literature selection would include 
tossups on authors, works and characters, on American, British, and 
World literature, and on fiction, drama, and poetry.

Difficulty:

Please keep your tossups between ACF Fall and ACF Regionals level 
difficulty (or, at about the difficulty level of last year's Penn 
Bowl).  When in question, err on the easier side.  It is not a good 
idea to explore canon expansion (i.e. writing about things that have 
never come up at tournaments before) in most of your tossups.

Every bonus should have a clear easy, medium and hard part.  Almost 
every team in the tournament should be converting the easy part of 
the bonus, while a little more than half of the teams should be 
converting the medium part.  The hard part of a bonus should be able 
to be answered by those with in-depth knowledge in the field, or 
approximately one quarter of the teams.

Question Length:

All of the following lengths apply to documents written in Word with 
1 inch margins (change these from the default), and a 10 point Times 
New Roman font.

Final tossups will be between 5.5 and 7.5 lines long.  However, we'd 
prefer that you submit tossups on the long side (or even over the 7.5 
line limit), since it's always easier for us to get rid of clues that 
we don't like than to add additional clues by ourselves.

Bonus parts should be kept within reason.  Do not write extremely 
lengthy leadins or bonus parts (try to keep them under 2 lines).  
Also do not write extremely short bonuses or list bonuses, as these 
are typically not very interesting.  The vast majority of your 
bonuses should be 10-10-10.  Please do not write any 30-20-10 
bonuses, and avoid bonuses with more than four answer parts.  Do not 
write any 5-10-15 bonuses, since making a single part worth half the 
bonus is less fair than having three parts worth the same amount of 
points.

Formatting:

Here is the general format for your questions.  But since the Yahoo 
board can't properly do formatting, please consult http://
www.hsquizbowl.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=62273 for how the 
formatting should really work.

1/1 Unfunny Meta Example Questions:

The person involved in this event is starting a rumor that it was 
actually a planned occurrence to get himself mentioned in a meta 
question in Matt Weiner's canceled Chicago Open trash tournament.  
Immediately after this event occurred, one person was unable to 
identify Okazaki Fragments.  It was preceded by Jeremy Eaton 
answering a tossup on time dilation.  The person responsible for this 
event blamed not getting enough sleep the night before and the two 
hour drive to Richmond, but most of all just plain not paying 
attention. Occurring in a game against South Carolina at the 2007 VCU 
Open, it is now immortalized in the YTMND page Nude Descending a Gas 
Chamber. FTP, identify this action wherein Mike Bentley erroneously 
answered "The Armory Show" for "Auschwitz".
ANSWER: Worst Buzz (also accept Nude Descending a Gas Chamber before 
mentioned, Mike Bentley's Embarrassing Neg with The Armory Show on 
the Auschwitz Question at the 2007 Illinois Novice Tournament, and 
clear knowledge equivalents; do not accept just "Armory Show" or 
"Auschwitz")

Answer the following about a certain comic strip, FTPE.
[10] Like Chris Ray, the title character of this Dik Browne comic 
strip has red hair and a big beard, and is also illiterate and bathes 
only once a year.
ANSWER: Hagar the Horrible
[10] Using Wikipedia might erroneously lead you to believe that Hagar 
the Horrible was based on this play by Henrik Ibsen in which Sigurd 
defeats Hjördis by killing her sentinel, a white bear.
ANSWER: The Vikings at Helgeland
[10] If Jonathan Magin had his way, Hagar the Horrible and all other 
comic strips would be inspired by this Robert Louis Stevenson novel 
about some Scottish dude and his buried treasure.
ANSWER: The Master of Ballantrae

DO NOT USE ANY AUTOMATIC WORD FORMATTING EXCEPT FOR SMART QUOTES.  
Specifically, do not use any indentation or automatic numbering in 
your packets.  Submit all packets in .doc or .rtf format please.

If questions are not correctly formatted (at the discretion of the 
editors), your packet will be returned for you to reformat.  If you 
submit your packet at the deadline and it is rejected for formatting 
issues, you will be charged a $10 formatting fee (and asked to 
reformat the packet), but you will not have to pay any additional 
fees for missing the deadline.

Misc.:

As with all packet submission tournaments, questions must be blind to 
all other teams attending the tournament.  Specifically, if a school 
is sending more than one team to the tournament, members of different 
teams should not know of each others' questions.

Please do not plagiarize questions.  Do not copy direct passages and 
phrases from the sources you use to write questions.  Additionally, 
do not write questions directly out of Wikipedia.  While Wikipedia 
can be a useful source in finding preliminary information on a 
question, we encourage you to use more in-depth, scholarly and peer 
reviewed sources when writing your questions.  Please see various 
question writing guides such as Jerry's guide for more information on 
where to find good sources for writing questions.

REGISTERING:

To register, please contact tournament director Mike Bentley at 
mike000_at_....  Please indicate how many teams you're brining and 
what discounts you think you apply for (such as the number of 
moderators and buzzers you're bringing).  For the most part, we'll 
accept high school, non-affiliated and hybrid teams in additional to 
traditional college teams, but please contact me first.

Details on where the tournament will be held and when specifically 
registration will be will be announced closer to the date of the 
tournament.  

Regards,
Mike Bentley and Jonathan Magin
Tournament Directors

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0: Sat 12 Feb 2022 12:30:49 AM EST EST