Re: ACF - Question Difficulty

Again, strictly opinion, but I do agree with
Subash. Just because something is labelled as "ACF" or
ACF-ish does not give one license to write the world's
hardest questions (try to save that for Masters
tournaments where people can tar and feather you for some of
the obscure questions you want to write :)
).

In principle, as much as I do understand, ACF was
founded to provide questions that have more basis and
relevance to the college curriculum than College Bowl was
providing at the time. The idea (from my own perspective)
is to create a tournament in which questions that
really related to the college curriculum or the level of
knowledge undergraduates and graduate students should know,
rather than the "have you read all the Time magazines"
current events/popular culture/"common denominator"
questions that College Bowl had been writing (and for many,
I know my description is being nice). Sure there
were other issues, such as allowing more graduate
students the opportunity to play, the difference of
opinion on timed rounds, and dislike for variable-point
bonuses (although those did exist at ACF for a time). But
overall, the questions would be pyramidally structured and
academically relevant. (Anyone else from the old days, please
comment if anything I wrote here is not entirely
accurate.)

That being said, from the editorial side, yes, there
is only so much we can do with extremely hard
questions, much less with an entire packet of obscure items.
As with all q-sub tourneys (like Penn Bowl and the
ACF tournaments), the questions you submit will
determine how good the tournament is. It is neither the
desire nor the goal of any TD to have games in which
only 100 points or fewer were scored by BOTH teams (on
average).

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