MACF

mACF (short for "mock-ACF" or "modified-ACF") is a term applied to academic tournaments that follow the ACF format without being official ACF events. They may occasionally deviate from ACF Rules, such as by having powers.

Usefulness of term

The term was used more often in the early and mid-2000s, when college and high school tournaments were more likely to imitate CBI or bad local formats. Since every full-length tournament in collegiate quizbowl besides NAQT ICT uses an untimed tossup/bonus format, and most use questions that are closer to ACF style than NAQT's, it is unclear what helpful information is communicated by dubbing a collegiate tournament mACF as opposed to not doing so. It is generally more effective to give a more detailed description of the intended length and difficulty standards of one's tournament (e.g. "7-line tossups, difficulty akin to ACF Regionals 2010"), and more tournament announcements have done so since the early 2010s, leaving the term "mACF" behind.

More recently, the term has seen a resurgence of usage among the high-school community, to distinguish sets with an ACF-like subject distribution (including PACE NSC and most housewrites) from NAQT sets. Since 2018–19, GrogerRanks has released a set of "mACF-only" rankings (along with a set of "NAQT-only" rankings) before each year's midseason and pre-nationals polls, and after each year's nationals.

See also

• ACF
• ACF format