Beth G. also wrote: "However, my biggest disappointment with NAQT ICT was [...] that the SAME questions were used for Div 1 and Div 2." Yes. Absolutely. Living life too close to the edge of deadlines hurt us on this, and in order to get the ICT rounds finished at all we were forced to abandon producing separate, significantly easier, rounds for Division II as we had in the past. And, as I promised many times to many people Friday or Saturday, as we will always do in future. Be assured that we knew full well that these questions--that seemed to hit our desired difficulty level for a Div. I national championship rather well--were not at all the most desirable level for Div. II. Being more or less the father of Div. II myself, you can imagine how distressed I was by what by last week had become the necessity of giving the Div. II field the same question set we were giving Div. I. I feared far worse results than was in fact the case. Though matches overall were to be sure a good deal lower scoring than we would normally ever want, I was quite impressed with the way in which most of the Div. II teams bore the brutality and kept very upbeat about the competition, changed as it may have been from expectations going in. Again: we've had an organizational breast-beating over this, and we are determined that future ICTs will have separate question sets, each meant to be of appropriate difficulty for championships at the level they will be used for. Tom Chuck wrote: "Pardon my ignorance on this, but I had thought that one should set the power matching rounds such that you want the best teams playing by the latter rounds of the power matching, and not the first. This is because you'll get those matchups with ladder play later." Ignorance pardoned. No, our power matching will immediately match the two best teams if they have not yet played one another. They won't play again until the ladder. If there are a clear two best teams they should meet once prior to the ladder playoffs, and it might as well be the first round of power-matching. I don't understand why there would be any desirability--why it would matter one way or the other--to delaying the one meeting they are bound to have prior to the ladder playoffs.
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