Adding to Ahmed's notes, you also have to remember that plagiarism is incompatible with the true ideal of academic scholarship. When you are in school and write a paper, you are not supposed to copy someone else's paper and claim it as your own. Similarly, academic competition should reward what people know, not what people may have seen on Jeopardy! the day or week before, or some similar situation. The game is about recall admittedly... but recall of a nature that represents one's knowledge of the subject being asked. Sure there are many of us who take this game a lot more seriously than we should. But if you tolerate the fraud, then this "academic" game simply is nothing more than a farce, and the whole circuit might as well be repeating questions we heard last week. As for whether Questions Unlimited has cultivated players so they can play at the high school level, I posit the following question: what impact has any of Chip Beall's Hall of Fame members had on the college circuit? And we have heard from three different individuals who have played at Chip's competitions in the last year or two who are part of the college circuit who are of the opinion that Chip is actually hurting kids from being prepared for college competitions. I know I like to do this on my own time and for no pay. Writing questions is something I enjoy doing, as well as officiating matches and running tournaments. I do my best to encourage people to write questions and run competitions because I want them to have the same love for the game that I do. However, telling them that it's okay to plagiarize a question and submit it to Penn Bowl (for example) is not acceptable because it denies the writer an opportunity to learn about a subject. To have the "most prolific question writer" of our day be shown to plagiarize not only from the Stanford Archives but also from Trivial Pursuit (TM) or Jeopardy! (TM) flies in contempt of this rationale. I agree we're all bigger than this. But I also believe that we cannot abrogate our responsibility to encourage this game for the best interests of the high school student teams -- from which our future qb players will arise. P.S. Do you think Chip Beall would have a problem if I ran a tournament using his questions without giving him any credit? Let's say I use the past 3 years of Twenty Questions and run it as a part of a worksheet round for a middle school or high school competition. Do you think QU will just sit idly by and not take any legal action if they found out? The questions (and the answers) are free for all to see so there should be no problem using it the way I want to... right?
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