>>Perhaps this is an indictment of the
general high school curriculum.<<
The
average high school curriculum doesn't include, for one
example, literary history in the same scope that
collegiate or (well-written) high school quizbowl does.
Whether that's good or bad is another matter, but
hopefully one goal of high school participation in quizbowl
is exposure to new topics. Just as a class is the
better forum for learning critical analysis of a
particular work, quizbowl might be a better forum for
learning who wrote any of several hundred titles. By
making no distinction between the two and simply
reworking test questions into packets (I've seen this done
literally on one occasion), bad question writers deny
participants one of the major draws of the game.
--M.W.