May as well throw my $0.02 in here: Is there the
same problem at the college level that is rampant at
the high school level, where tournament packets have
"hidden themes"? This is when you order packets from
commerical vendors and you find that there is at least one
question per round on Civil War battles or surface areas
of rectangular prisms, for example (certianly there
could be more variety in American history and math!).
The worst example is when all of the English
questions in a packet are about suffixes with no literature
or other relevant topics. In all fairness to the
vendors, they probably write sets as individual sets and
not tournament packets, but it is still frustrating.
--David