How to study

Studying for quizbowl

Dürer’s Saint Jerome in His Study

Studying · Practice

Concepts

Importance

Uniqueness

Knowledge

Real knowledge

Flashcards · Osmosis · List studying
Packet study · Fraud · Read a book

Guides

How to study

How to flashcard (FAQ)

How to run a practice

How to prepare for nationals

Studying is a very important part of the game of quiz bowl and the key to improving. This guide is intended to lay out concrete steps for a player who is looking for advice on how to start studying. It is certainly not intended to be definitive.

This guide was written by User:Kevin Wang and thus reflects their particular thoughts.

For additional resources on improving, be sure to check out the "Guides" section of the article on studying.

Start
a team

Run a
practice

Study for a
tournament

The mental

Quiz bowl is game of the brain. Matches are won through months of preparation and study, but they may be lost through psyching oneself out at the last moment.

Prepare for success

It can be daunting to step out of a game room with the realization of how much there is to learn about the world. One of the most important things to know is that it is entirely feasible (and indeed, quite common) for a player to become very skilled in a relatively short amount of time. This is especially true at the high school level, where every year new teams emerge as contenders for the title.

It should not be forgotten that this requires dedication and hard work - the journey is long one, but the rewards are real.

Think positively

There are a lot of ideas floating around out there about what intangible aspects make one suited for improving: Carol Dweck's growth mindset, Angela Duckworth's grit, Abraham Maslow's self-actualization, etc. The general thrust of these ideas is a desire to do better is sometimes as important as the action itself.

• Every question you miss is a question you can get next time.
• Each tournament you play is an opportunity for improvement.
• Each loss you take is a learning experience.

Don't tilt

To "tilt" is to allow one's emotions to dominate their performance - it's a term from poker which has become common place in e-sports and other online spaces. Tilting might manifest in a negstorm or a loss of confidence on the buzzer.

Some concrete steps to avoid this sort of response:

• Learn to ignore negs: Sometimes you as a player are put in a situation where guessing is optimal and the chance of a neg is very high. Sometimes you just neg. Few games are decided by a single tossup and even those are just a game.
• Learn your confidence intervals: A scenario so common it's practically parody is negging one tossup a clue too early, only to overcompensate and sit too long on the next one. Spend a few practices tracking how confident you are when you buzz. This can help instill patience when unsure and develop confidence when certain.

Find love for the game

Quiz bowl is a hobby, and one with little prestige. Though some regions have well-regarded tournaments and there's no denying the sheen on nationals, the majority of the drive to improve must come from within.

Being able to find a consistent and resilient source of motivation is an important part of long-term success and short-term enjoyment of this little trivia game.

• Learn to enjoy the game separately from your performance

Many players find the motivation for studying from things like spite or the emotion of "number goes up". It is a documented fact that this is a successful strategy. However, the returns rapidly diminish - it is simply not possible to constantly increase one's PPG, or even maintain it as you move up in difficulty. Tying your mental state to statistical performance or winning can achieve results in the short term, but it often causes frustration as your career progresses.

Some things which can serve as sources of enjoyment:

• An appreciation for learning: Hearing questions that one does not convert becomes more tolerable if the goal is to hear about new things rather than maximize points.
• Always winning the buzzer race: If you lose a buzzer race, it means you knew the same clue. Recognizing this fact and adjusting your mindset can make these situations more tolerable.
• Rewarding your knowledge: One of the most satisfying things in quiz bowl is being able to hear clues which you are personally invested in, either because you've studied them or previously knew them. Focusing on these things you did know can be better than fixating on things you didn't.
• Having a good time: Games often have an intrinsic comedy to them. Your fellow players share similar interests. Each game and each tournament are an opportunity to spend time with your peers. Don't get in your own head about it.

One does not need to have perfect motivations to improve or to want to improve - however, it is always useful to start cultivating a healthy and positive mindset.

• Avoid burnout

This is a very common problem, especially as one transitions from one level of the game to the next (high school to college in particular). As you improve, the natural progression is to expand your workload to the maximum that is sustainable. As passion subsides, either in the off-season or through the natural progression of time, what was once reasonable can become daunting.

• Normalize taking rest days: If you have a routine, skip it. If you have cards due, don't do them. Don't think about quiz bowl for a day, a week, as long as you want. There are merits to consistency, but also to inconsistency.
• Stop if you want: Attending tournaments isn't mandatory. Going to practice isn't mandatory. Playing quiz bowl isn't mandatory. If you've spent the time and decided the best choice is to step away, do it. Don't stay out an obligation, only out of enjoyment.
• Learn because you love it: One of the unfortunate facts of quiz bowl is that it doesn't always award points for our interests. It can be easy to set aside things you enjoy to maximize points. Consider just learning about material you actually want to learn about for a bit - maybe write a vanity set (at your own pace).

• Expanding outwards

One of the most rewarding aspects of quiz bowl is the exposure to new topics. It provides a list of books to read, of movies to watch, of art to consume. In many ways, a set is a catalogue of its writers's interests - take advantage of this.

It is often said that reading books is the least efficient means of studying - however, it is likely the most entertaining.

The physical

Ask a hundred players on how to study, and you'll get a hundred answers. The process is very subjective, with different players having different methodologies. The key is to create a plan that works for you.

Some broad stages:

1. Consider your own experiences
2. Accumulate information
3. Write things down
4. Work to retain information

All of these stages happen in parallel. This guide will discuss "What" and "How".

What to study

The core of studying is the reading of informational sources. However, it may be hard to know what information is "important": what will translate to points.

Here are some heuristics for understanding the information landscape of quiz bowl:

• Quiz bowl is a game

Even at its best, quiz bowl is an imperfect mirror of a mere slice of the real world. The nuanced reality of a topic can rarely be encapsulated in a short paragraph of trivia. It's still very worthwhile to appreciate these complexities as you encounter them - just don't expect to get many points for them.

• Quiz bowl has a history

The first instances of a quiz bowl-like game were played in the 1950s. The modern game has existed for several decades. Many common topics have had tens, if not hundreds, of questions written on them. This pool of knowledge is an important resource because it is an easily accessible set of information that has already been processed into the quiz bowl modality. An important caveat is that question quality has increased so much that tournaments from before a certain date are largely useless for learning purposes.

• Questions are written by other players

Understanding that there is another person producing the questions you will be playing is very important. Writers have to go through a process of finding clues and ordering them - writing your own questions or just adopting that mindset can help you identify key topics or predict future trends. It is also important to be empathetic to the real humans whose volunteer work helps make this hobby possible for everyone.

• Difficulty is a spectrum

Studying can help you quickly grow more comfortable at any level of the game. Once you've chosen a target difficulty like that of HSNCT or NSC, you can prepare more effectively by understanding that clues used in high school questions often first appear in college sets. Spending time playing questions harder than your goal can be enough to get you acclimated and will regularly expose you to harder topics which you would otherwise only see sporadically.

Accumulate information

No source is better for answering quiz bowl questions than old quiz bowl questions. Nevertheless, there are other advantages to learning from other places: for one, you eventually run out of questions to read. For another, playing questions is the counterpart to writing them; predicting what will eventually come up is an effective way to guarantee points in the future.

Source	Advantages	Disadvantages
Packet study	Existing questions are, more or less by definition, only clues. The archive houses just about every non-NAQT set from the modern era. Many question readers now exist, which provide an interactive component to packet reading.	The cost of this efficiency is that this the most artificial way to engage with information - you lose much of the intangible benefits of learning.
Wikipedia	The premiere online encyclopedia is well-fleshed out for many topics which appear in quiz bowl. Many question writers rely heavily on Wikipedia as a source for questions (for better or worse).	Niche topics have very spotty coverage and are subject to strong biases in more or less random directions. There is no guarantee that any given editor will have any idea what they're doing.
Textbooks	With academic relevance being one of the most important criteria of importance, a reputable textbook is guaranteed to have information which will appear in quality questions. Most textbooks are designed as pedagogical instruments and are intentionally structured to facilitate effective learning and retention.	As a textbook becomes more technical, the percentage of information which is relevant to quiz bowl rapidly drops. The sheer quantity of information on even the most niche fields is overwhelming. Textbooks are very long - even examples with obvious utility (like those for AP exams) will be hundreds of pages long.
Primary sources (books, scientific papers, etc.)	These are the font from which knowledge springs forth, the wellspring from which all clues are derived. Or whatever. At their shortest, this could be something like a famous sonnet whose sixteen lines are remembered by all, or a short story whose details are all memorable. It is likely that you'll run into some of these in the course of your studies, meaning they'll be things you have a reason to remember.	At their longest, these can be enormous tomes which nobody cares about anymore (if they ever did at all). Even at intermediate length, a book of a hundred pages is ultimately distilled into a tossup of seven lines - even across a hundred such tossups, most of this information only serves to entertain.

The question of "which textbooks" and "which sources" is a question with some complexity. For at least one example, see How to become a good science player.

Different categories have different relationships to their source materials. While plot summaries (online and otherwise) are certainly an important part of learning literature, more or less every question hinges on reading an actual piece of writing. Meanwhile, a student of the sciences is likely to never read a paper until they're in college and will primarily engage with the subject through textbooks.

Even an hour of studying a week will pay dividends - this doesn't scale infinitely, but it does scale. Be careful to avoid overtaxing yourself - take frequent breaks, both during individual study sessions and over longer timescales.

How to study

Consider your own experiences

Think about how you've studied in other situations. When preparing for exams, what worked for you?

Lean on your past - if you have a tried-and-true method for studying for math or what have you, it'll work for quiz bowl too.

Write things down

Basically every route to studying involves writing things down. There are two major reasons to write things down:

1. during active studying, writing something down can be an exercise in retention and will directly aid learning
2. it may allow you to record topics to focus on

Here are some concrete ways that this may manifest:

• writing down what you learn while reading into a document
• bringing a notebook to practice and tournaments to record answerlines to study or clues to remember
• writing practice questions on topics you know well and those you don't know at all

Much of the utility of these documents is in the creation - the act of curating information and researching is very productive. It is possible to procure online study documents from other players, but be wary: you will rarely out-buzz someone based on something they wrote down.

Work to retain information

See also: How to flashcard

This is some of the most tedious work of studying. In the previous steps, there is the inherent joy of discovery that comes from learning new things. At this stage there is only the hard work of memorization.

One of the most lauded (and most hated) methods of retention is the humble flashcard. Any serious effort at carding should use an app that employs spaced repetition: the largest such apps are Anki and Mnemosyne. The major advantage of this technique is that, over a period of time, you will be presented with the cards which you perform the most poorly at and can thus focus on remembering them. Compare this to a simpler method like Quizlet or physical cards - with those you are subject to the laws of chance with regards to what order you review and when. While there is little difference for a deck of size ten or even a hundred, it is not uncommon for quiz bowlers to eventually amass thousands or tens of thousands of flashcards.

Example

Jean Quizbowler is a (hypothetical) high school quiz bowl player. Their club just graduated the team that went to nationals last year. Jean decides they want to study extra to help qualify for HSNCT this year.

Jean comes up with a study plan: one hour a day, two on weekends without a tournament. Attend practice every week (except when it overlaps with their orchestra rehearsals). Meet up at the library on Thursdays with the rest of the team to read a few extra packets.

The team was struggling to cover fine arts, so Jean decides to pick it up. They start shallow by creating a list of topics to learn about. First Jean writes every answerline they can think of; then they visit a packet reader like QDB and filter by "Fine Arts" and "Regular High School", writing down everything they missed. In the end, the document looks something like a frequency list.

Jean begins to systematically cover the canon at the high school. For every entry on their list, they assemble a page of notes by going to a packet archive and cross-referencing previous questions on the answerline. Sometimes, they take the notes directly from Wikipedia. Sometimes they just skip things they don't care about.

Jean's started a routine. They use Anki (the graphs are nice looking) and finish their queued cards every day - every day but tournament day. Sometimes an answerline comes out of left-field; Jean brings a notebook for those.

The increase in PPG has been noticeable - the one in PPB, too. Jean appreciates all the things they've learned about music - jazz in particular. It seems the team will make HSNCT this year - Jean decides to ease off for the rest of the year. They'll be graduating soon - they're excited to see what college quiz bowl will bring.