HSNCT and its Problems

"HSNCT and its Problems" was a forum thread started by Aadi Karthik in the lead-up to the 2021 HSNCT. The thread's goal was to outline a number of issues with the logistics of HSNCT and with the operation of NAQT more generally.

Aadi's initial post was widely criticized for its poor tone and the naivete of its arguments regarding logistics, costs, and NAQT's finances.

Prologue

The 2021 season was marked by a rise in anti-NAQT sentiment among members of the high school community, largely centered around the hsquizbowl Discord. Throughout the regular season this manifested as widespread dismissal of IS sets in favor of housewrites like DART and STASH and (to some degree) the events run by AQBL. Some amount of this can be attributed to many members of the writing staff of these sets being active members of online spaces and actively proselytizing for their projects, but that behavior was not a new phenomenon. Regardless of the specific reasoning, it quickly became a popular opinion to think NAQT was uniquely bad as a quizbowl product and that the idiosyncrasies of the distribution (and in particular the mixed impure academic) were distinct negatives. Two months before HSNCT, a discussion of perceived flaws in the HSNCT set and the tournament itself in the hsquizbowl Discord culminated in the post; its opening line referenced these pseudo-private conversations by saying "this post is long overdue".

Initial post

The major points raised in the inintial post were a lack of guidelines to deal with cheating, the high cost of the tournament, the timing rules, and the supposedly low quality and variable difficulty of HSNCT questions. The post drew controversy for describing HSNCT questions as "low-quality", not "reasonable-quality product", and "of such low quality that it's hard to call NAQT 'pyramidal good quizbowl' anymore", and the decreased number of top teams attending HSNCT a "revolt". It is worth noting that the claim that NAQT is not "pyramidal good quizbowl" is objectively false.

Even as many pushed NAQT to change their timing rules and seconded the request for clarity on cheating guidelines, the remainder of the post was almost universally criticized and, in many cases, openly ridiculed. While several posters explicitly noted their openness to criticisms of NAQT and the HSNCT, the only person to agree with points of the original post was Aadi, who made a post reaffirming their support of their arguments after the fact.

Arguments

The post's discussion of HSNCT's format and cost prompted many rebuttals.

Point	Counterpoint(s)
At $650 HSNCT was "far too expensive", particularly when compared to NSC ($450) and ONCT ($250)	HSNCT is a competition run by NAQT, a for-profit company which has both strong incentives to lower costs as much as possible and unavoidable fixed costs NSC was a tournament with half as many teams run by a non-profit these are major factors for why they were able to cut prices ONCT was a first time national which outsourced its questions (to a group that included the author of this post) and would end up running into major logistical issues due to insufficient staff, while having a field roughly a quarter of HSNCT the vast, vast majority of teams paid less for 2021 HSNCT than any previous iteration, as there were no associated travel costs (which are almost always much, much more than the actual registration fees) it was noted that this may be been overlooked because Lambert High School, where the poster attended school, was in the same city as many recent HSNCTs (Atlanta) and thus would have zero travel or hotel costs
HSNCT's price was not justified because it only guaranteed 8 rounds, while tournaments like SMH Southeast had 9 and NSC had 13	One can argue about whether HSNCT has ever been worth it but it is not a point that is unique to the 2021 season. If the price of 10 rounds of HSNCT was justified, it is not a stretch to say that 8 rounds is also justified (especially when considering the travel-related savings mentioned in previous points). NSC has always guaranteed more games The comparison with SMH is an almost complete non-sequitur - the logistics of regular season (college) tournaments with 18 teams cannot be meaningfully compared to those of a national (high school) tournament with over two hundred teams. Even the comparison with NSC is strained - even though it is also a national, it is less than half the size of HSNCT. Obviously it would be preferable to use the "fairer" format of a round robin, but that requires orders of magnitude more rounds. HSNCT is already large enough that it has to use a card system for prelims (one of the few tournaments to do so); even after eliminating half the field, it still has over a hundred teams, which is far too large to do a true round robin and or even a rebracketing scheme.
HSNCT's use of double elimination is outdated and bad in comparison to a format using rebracketing; few tournaments still use double elimination.	The format of HSNCT is many things, but outdated is not one - it has received significant changes as recently as 2019 and is perhaps the most complicated format of any quizbowl tournament. Few other tournaments use double elimination because no non-HSNCT tournaments have ever approached the size of HSNCT.
NAQT should simply restrict its field size to make change to a different format possible.	While it's not an absurd idea that HSNCT limit its field to allow a better format, it would require cutting the majority of the field to implement this change - to have a format like NSC, one requires a field like NSC. The current format of HSNCT (with its split prelims on the card system and the double-elim playoffs) is the only reason it can be run at its current size, let alone expand (as it has historically done).
NAQT should release its packets for free after they are clear, as is done with housewrites.	Purchasing IS sets makes up an indeterminate but non-zero percentage of NAQT's profits. They have a compelling economic interest as a for-profit company to not releasing their packets. The current norm of questions being released for free after their mirrors are finished is largely a byproduct of the decentralized nature of quizbowl and its spirit of volunteerism. It is an unusual situation that is only sustained by the willingness of quizbowl writers and editors to write for pennies. It should not be held against NAQT that they are seeking a profit (both here and in general) because a) there is no compelling reason to believe that they do not act in the community's best interest, b) their prices are not unreasonable (especially in the case of packets), and c) they are not the only provider of this resource, so teams are not being excluded from participating because of this price barrier - there are many equivalent sets available for free

The discussion of difficulty received less scrutiny, as that is largely a subjective assessment. However, it was pointed out that the post's statement that one bonus was significantly harder than another was largely based on database hits (a method that is known to be flawed); furthermore, several posters disagreed with the conclusion.

The discussion of the mixed academic question on "souls" was largely invalidated because the poster lacked the awareness to know that the question's leadin (Sam & Dave's song Soul Man) easily met various criteria of importance. The use of phrase "boomer trash" to describe that clue was criticized both for being incorrect and for being a dismissive form of gatekeeping.

Aftermath

None of these counterpoints were ever addressed publicly, with any discussion that did occur happening in the hsquizbowl Discord (effectively out of the public eye) or in truly private channels.

After HSNCT, Kevin Wang made an inflammatory post asking whether Aadi still believed in any of the points made in the original post, in particular criticizing the seeming hypocrisy of Aadi attending HSNCT with his Lambert team (and performing well) after making the post. The response doubled down on the arguments regarding cost, prompting a final rebuttal by Patrick Matthews.

The sentiments that led to the writing of the post persisted (and may continue to persist) long after - in a Discord discussion held after the final post in the thread, individuals claimed that "its a general consensus" that NAQT questions didn't meet modern standards and that NAQT should just consider doing college mirrors of HSNCT. High schoolers continued to not understand the economics of quizbowl in general and NAQT in particular: claims were made that NAQT was not "even close to losing money" due to Buzzword, that NAQT should make HSNCT at a loss, that NAQT was not trying hard enough to lower prices, and that NAQT doesn't pay a lot for rooms.