Repeat

A repeat is pair of questions that are substantially similar (or, more rarely, identical). The term is also often applied to the second question of the pair that is heard.

Criteria to be a repeat vary depending on many factors, such as the following:

• Editorial philosophy
• Difficulty (easier tournaments have fewer plausible topics and it may thus be necessary to accept, e.g., repeated answer lines)
• The topic (e.g. two questions asking for France are generally considered okay if they have no clues in common and are in different packets; two questions asking for The World as Will and Representation in the same question set would generally be disdained even if they had no clues in common and were in different packets)
• The question kind (tossup-tossup repeats are generally considered worse than tossup-bonus repeats and bonus-bonus repeats)
• Whether it is possible for a team to play both questions (e.g. the 2018 HSNCT used a scheme in which each team played either rounds 1–7 or rounds 8–14, so there was a higher tolerance for repeats if one question was in the former group and the other in the latter)

Identical questions are never acceptable if they could be played by the same team twice, or heard by a team and later played by the same team. Merely repeating an answer line may be fine depending on the above factors. Repeating clues is usually not considered a best practice, especially if hearing one question would help answer the other. Some of these issues cross over into the idea of feng shui.

Some question providers check for repeats between different sets intended for the same audience, albeit less stringently. For example, NAQT does so within its Middle School Series, within its Invitational Series, within its Introductory Invitational Series, and between its SCT and ICT correspondingly by division.