> Now, with this year's packet set, it seems that TRASH has decided > to move closer to ACF Nationals and especially NAQT ICT in its > difficulty jump level. That makes the implicit distinction that such a jump was both real and intentional. [In the present case, I won't say it wasn't real, especially in the questions used on Sunday, where I think a good 15- 25% were going dead in the 7th place bracket.] One of the problems with writing and editing packets is what I will call the QB Law of Large Numbers: it takes large numbers of people to accurately gauge the difficulty of a question. Unfortunately, the nature of QB makes it very difficult to playtest questions on a large group of people. So, unfortunately, there is no way to accurately tell a priori if the bar has been set too high or too low. [BTW, for people who are interested, the conversion rates for this year's NAQT events were: DivI ICT: 5042 of 6303 TUs (80.0%), 892 for 15 Mid-Atl. DivI SCT: 1045 of 1196 TUs (87.4%), 230 for 15 DivII ICT: 3127 of 4276 TUs (73.1%), 318 for 15 New England DivII SCT: 631 of 828 TUs (76.2%), 69 for 15 Given that the field at the ICT was better than at any SCT, *and* the questions were harder, it isn't easy to say with any certainty whether or not the questions were too hard for the teams there; I suspect that only a small minority were in DivI, and probably a somewhat larger number in DivII.] --STI
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