I am spurred to this post by a couple of the questions at Presidential (Jung works, random female psychologists), but I am not bashing these questions per se. My bone to pick is that, of the psychology questions I've heard in College Bowl (and this means NAQT, ACF, everywhere), maybe 10% fall into the Psych. 101--Interpretation of Dreams level of difficulty and the other 90% are perhaps names who have come up before but could never be deciphered by the question wording. To be sure, I am not a psych. major nor have I ever played one. I have taken a few courses and read up a bit due to interest. Yet I haven't that huge a knowledge base and I would suspect many question writers don't either. How else to account for the dearth of questions about ominpresent, seminal concepts such as "transference" or "cathexis?" Or the good old defenses? I suppose one could even write a kick-ass question on the "id." Instead, it's abstruse references to the papers and works of the same few folks (Adler, Horney, Klein, A. Freud, Bettelheim, etc.) and somehow they all manage to sound the same. SOOOO...let's be regressive here...who or what is to blame here? Badly worded questions? Ignorant question writers? Ignorant players? The breadth and abstrusity of the subject? To what extent each factor? Come on. Weigh in. You know you want to. (My main motivation in writing this is not because I'm pissed that psych. questions don't afford me sufficient ppg but rather that I hate to see them give such a great subject a bad name.) Self-righteously, Ben Malkevitch
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