To date I've hosted 3 high school tournaments,
and our club has never produced the questions
ourselves. I've noticed that even the best teams let a lot
of the questions go unanswered. Maybe this isn't a
problem other places, but Iowa doesn't have a very
organized high school quiz competition. But I'm going to
assume that at least some of you have heard comments
along the lines of "boy those questions were hard."
I think the cause of this is that when college quiz
bowlers set out to write high school questions, they end
up writing easy college questions. While I'm sure
there are exceptions, most high schoolers don't know
about operas, philosophers, or artists. It seems like
the only area where high school students' knowledge
overlaps college quiz bowlers' is sports, and to a lesser
extent trash in general. While I fully applaud efforts
to expand the horizons of quiz bowlers, I think we
don't quite take high schoolers ignorance into account
when writing questions. I'm interested in what others
think, particularly if you've written for a high school
tournament in the past.