Academic

The term academic has two meanings in quizbowl:

• In collegiate quizbowl, "academic" tournaments are those tournaments which are not trash tournaments.

• In general, "academic" material is what mainstream quizbowl thinks questions should be about. Academic material means important facts about important topics in liberal arts fields that are relevant to understanding the context and importance of the topic in the way one might digest it in an upper-level interpretive class. It excludes not only trash but also trivia, riddles and trick questions, memorization of irrelevancies, and math calculation and other performance-based or not strictly factual knowledge. See trivia.