>>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.<< I'd imagine this occurs because the great majority of high school writing companies have no idea what they're doing. Nearly all of the high school tournaments run by colleges as well as those run by the better high school teams use tossups of more than a sentence, some variation on a tossup-bonus format, questions on actual literature, and history questions not on the American Civil War. Yet in many high school writing companies' sets, there's a ridiculous emphasis on short questions, math calculation, grammar, and pre-1900 American history to the exclusion of material from other time periods and countries. These are all topics geared towards smart students rather than good quizbowl players--instead of trying to balance quality and accessiblity, quality is discarded so that a straight-A student will be the best player. --Matt Weiner
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