Regarding Stan's message regarding possible plagiarism in some NAQT ICT questions from 1999 ACF Regionals -- as NAQT's Chief Editor, this message alarmed me enough to drive to my office at 10 pm on a Sunday night to look at my files of the NAQT ICT and 1999 ACF Regionals. First of all, Stan's idea that "many questions were taken almost verbatim from the packets which we had practiced on all week" can't seem plausible to an NAQT editor, knowing how our tournament sets are put together. 38 different writers contributed to the ICT set, with every question being vetted by at least two different editors after submission by writers, and our editors change stuff quite freely. A writer for us could conceivably screw up and submit something to us that he or she had also submitted to ACF, due to poor recordkeeping or something, but even if we had some writer sabotaging us by submitting plagiarized questions, it would be almost impossible to wind up with a whole bunch of them coming from the same source and being used in the same tournament by us. Of course there will be things coming up in a tournament that mirror information read just that week in practice -- that's entirely normal. Anytime you read questions on the way to a tournament it is a sure bet that some of what you read will reappear in eerie ways. The "many questions were taken almost verbatim" from a particular tournament comment I just can't credit, however, without seeing evidence; it isn't plausible, given how we operate. If some particular question we use is found to be identical in language in some apparently non-innocent way to a question previously used somewhere else, you can be sure we want to know about it. Our questions are coded to identify their authors, and we would not take clear evidence of plagiarism lightly. (continued next message)
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