Academic Hallmarks
| ||||
| President or CEO | Owner: Pat Jewell | |||
| Location: | Ohio | |||
| Status | Open | |||
Academic Hallmarks, abbreviated as AH and sometimes known as The Great Auk or AUK for its mascot, is a software publishing and question writing company historically based in Durango, Colorado. They supply decidedly non-pyramidal questions to a number of invitational tournaments, including Knowledge Bowl events in several states. From 1983 until 2013 they organized the online Knowledge Master Open competition.
Question quality
AH has historically produced questions in which no attempt at following "good quizbowl" principles like pyramidality or avoiding trivia is made. Many questions for the high school sets rely on elementary-school-level knowledge of English grammar and deliberately appear to try to mislead players as to what is even being asked using a variety of swerves and hoses as well as unclear lead-ins and extraneous information. Questions that consisted entirely of lists of various things that players had to identify as well as quotes were common. Wild difficulty swings from question-to-question, limited answer lines, extremely short questions, and confusing syntax can befuddle players and can easily lead to bizarre match outcomes.
A uniquely bad quizbowl feature of AH sets consisted of questions in the form of puns and riddles in which the player must provide the punchline for made-up limericks and ditties in order to "answer" the question. Many questions year-to-year were often either near-verbatim repeats of questions from previous years or on the same pet topics of the author's personal interest, often involving things having to do with Colorado or nearby areas.
See a sample Academic Hallmarks packet from 2010.
History
Former School district superintendent Bill Brown founded Academic Hallmarks in 1982 after working with Colorado Knowledge Bowl for many years. As of June 2020, the original founder stepped down and Pat Jewell took over. During the 2020-2021 school year, AH appeared to supply Questions Unlimited with questions for several events and technical support for QU's online events. A number of previous clients of AH such as the state Knowledge Bowl organizations in Minnesota, Colorado, and Washington switched to using Question Authorities instead.
Events using AH questions
Historically, Academic Hallmarks operated in perhaps even more of an "alternate universe" to the "good quizbowl" scene than Questions Unlimited does, with very little overlap with other quizbowl competitions. The Great Auk had considerable influence on circuits in Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Minnesota, and South Dakota, with pockets of AH questions usage in Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, New Hampshire and several other states. Academic Hallmarks even has (or had) some international clients in Syria, Egypt, Russia, China, and Germany as they appear to market it to international schools.
A list of AH "pristine question users" posted at http://www.greatauk.com/pristineusers.html and maintained through the 2000s contained many tournaments which have in fact switched to NAQT questions over the years. Several other "tournaments" listed on that page have gone defunct. It is unclear if a number of other tournaments and leagues that use AH questions are using pristine questions or instead "custom" question sets of questions from previous years of AH, which are all still sold from AH and updated yearly in a large database. For an example of such a list, see 2012-2013 Academic Hallmarks events.
The full calendar is no longer maintained or linked from the main website as of the 2013-2014 competition year, with a more recent list of events as of Fall 2020 being much shorter than the list below.