SCT
NAQT Sectionals (also known as SCT or the Sectional Championship Tournament), is an annual collegiate tournament run on NAQT questions and rules hosted at many different sites throughout the United States (and occasionally internationally).
Sectionals divide teams into Division I and Division II brackets, provided there are enough teams, and award recognition for the top undergraduate team playing in Division I. Each Division I packet has 24 tossups and 24 bonuses at collegiate regular difficulty, while Divison II packet questions are significantly easier. Some questions written for one set will overlap with the other or have an adjusted-difficulty version in the other set in the same round.
History
In November 2009, NAQT announced a partnership with ACUI. As part of this deal, the section format used by NAQT was dropped in favor of ACUI's regions. As a result, several sites in 2011 were chosen with little to no regard for quiz bowl in the area. This led to confusion and complaints about SUNY-New Paltz for Region 2, Moravian for Region 4 (3 was added as well), and East Carolina for Region 5. This may have had more to do with NAQT trying to collect bids in August, a full 7 months before the tournaments and while virtually all clubs were on break. The ACUI partnership ended after the 2013 SCTs.
Since 2009, SCT has often been "guest-edited" by one or more active college players, who sit out SCT but receive an automatic bid to the ICT for their team. Seth Teitler was the first person to do this.
From the first SCTs in 1997 through 2017, all SCTs were timed. Beginning in 2018, SCTs switched to untimed gameplay in response to community concerns about timing (especially with the difficulty of recruiting quality moderators).
Reception
SCT is sometimes criticized for its subject distribution and/or difficulty. These issues have been raised less in recent years due to improving quality and increasing acceptance of distributions other than the ACF distribution.
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