What follows is a condensation of an idea I have submitted to the remainder of GWACC's triumvirate as a means of reducing the likelihood of another such shameful incident as we faced this past Saturday. The idea is simple, and can be summarized in one sentence: each question in a submitted quizbowl pack should bear with it some identifying mark of authorship indicating not merely the team who wrote it, but the individual. It is not uncommon practice for a packet to include a brief credit to its authors at its head. My suggestions is that the community simply extend this idea as per NAQT procedure by assigning an individual mark or number, unique within the context of the packet, to each author, and including a key to these marks within the header of the packet. In other words, each contributor on a given pack would choose a number, letter, or symbol of some sort which would follow or precede each question they wrote; the pack would contain a brief table keying each symbol to a particular author. The advantage to implementing this system, as I see it, is that, for a minimum amout of effort, it discourages plagiarism by quickly identifying the supposed author of suspect questions. A positive side-effect of this system is that longtime players and authors may look back on packs they have written in previous years in order to examine their own evolution and preferences and gain better understanding into their own tendencies of play. Edmund
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