I don't respond to messages on this board very often, and I don't really have the time to do so now, but this message seemed to be based on two assumptions that I would strongly question: namely, that question difficulty is rapidly rising through an "arms race", and that part of the reason for this trend is the increasing prominence of dinosaurs on the circuit. I'll begin with the second of these two assumptions: that dinosaurs play a larger role on the circuit now than they have in the past. I may not be the best person to comment on this, since I'm now beginning my seventh year of play; at the same time, however, I'm sympathetic to the view that quizbowl should primarily be a game for undergrads. (This will be my last year as a player, for example.) I think it's possible to make reasonable arguments both ways on whether grad students are, on balance, good or bad for the circuit. But I think that any such debate needs to be based on the facts, and that the facts suggest that grad student dominance has--if anything-- decreased over the last five years. Here's some statistical evidence for my argument. In 2002, four of the teams in the top ten at the NAQT ICT were composed completely of undergrads (#4 Princeton, #7 Michigan B, #8 Florida, and #9 Harvard.) NAQT doesn't have the stats for the 1997 ICT on its web- site, for some reason, but IIRC, there was only one undergrad-only team in the top ten at the inaugural NAQT Nationals: #5 Maryland A. I also think it's fair to say--though, again, I can't say for sure--that grad students played a smaller role on non-undergrad teams in 2002 than they did in 1997. If I'm not mistaken, last year's #2 team-- Virginia--had only one grad student, responsible for less than half of his team's scoring. 1997's #2 team, Harvard, had at least two grad students (Jeff Johnson and J.J. Todor), one of whom was by far its highest scorer. The picture is similar for other teams when you compare 1997 with 2002: 1997's #3, Berkeley, was (if I'm not mistaken) all grad-student, while undergrads were responsible for roughly half the scoring on 2002's #3 team (Chicago). 1997's #4 team, Cornell, was dominated by one grad student (Eric Tentarelli), while 2002's #4 (Princeton) was completely undergrad. And so on. I don't want to minimize the effects of grad students on the circuit or to deny that it can be discouraging for new players to face opponents who've been playing quizbowl for 6 or more years. I've sometimes wondered whether the relatively poor state of quizbowl on the West Coast is, in part, attributable to the dominance of grad students on the Berkeley team, and I can imagine that it would be intimidating to be an inexperienced undergrad on a newly formed team in the Midwest these days. Nevertheless, I feel very confident saying that undergrad-only teams have become _more_ competitive in recent years. If I'm not mistaken, 10 of the 20 teams in the top 20 at last year's ICT were undergrad- only: Princeton A, Michigan B, Florida, Harvard, Emory, Yale A, Pittsburgh, CWRU, Carleton, and Rutgers. Compare that to 1998, when Swarthmore, Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins, and Carleton were the only all- undergrad teams in the top 20. When you factor in the growth of Division II tournaments, I feel very confident saying that there are more opportunities now for undergrads to compete and win than there have ever been before. And, speaking as someone who had to face the likes of Jeff Johnson, Jim Dendy, Eric Tentarelli, and Dwight Kidder at his first two collegiate tournaments, I can testify that new players have _always_ had to face experienced dinosaurs. The issue of question difficulty is somewhat trickier. Are questions sometimes (or often) too hard? Yes, of course. This is an issue that the circuit definitely needs to work on in the years ahead--but I think that this work has already begun. I expect next month's Fall ACF tournament to be a welcome step in the right direction, just like last year's installment of the tournament. I feel confident that NAQT's next SCT and ICT will be accessible to all players. (In fact, if you want to see what's happened with question difficulty on the circuit, compare last year's SCT and ICT questions to the questions from the 1998 or 1999 SCT and ICT, and I think you'll find that the questions are more accessible now than they've often been in the past.) I think the issue of question difficulty is often seen in an overly simplistic light, however: there are many different ways to produce a question that's inaccesssible to new players (or even to their more experienced team-mates.) Sometimes players write packets that are just too hard--the questions are reasonable for experienced team members, but too obscure for new players, or mid-level players, or even for reasonably active and inexperienced players. Many writers and editors--including me, at times--could do a better job of making sure that their questions are accessible to everyone. But it's easy to confuse okay-but-too-difficult questions with incompetently written questions. Here's another explanation for packets that seem really inaccessible: their questions are about topics that no one knows or cares about, and which would seem unreasonable even to the most experienced of grad students. The hallmark of these questions is that they can't be revised into pyramidal form: many players will never answer them correctly, and those who do will either buzz in instantly (because they know the subject really well) or at the very end (since every clue will seem just as obscure as the ones before.) They often aren't written by dinosaurs concerned only with writing really difficult questions for each other--they're written by players at all levels of talent and experience, players who simply don't know how to write a good question. No one enjoys playing on these questions--not even the experienced grad students who are supposedly producing them in a fiercely competitive arms race. In this sense, an important subset of really hard questions is closely related to another (even larger) set of incompetently written questions--the poorly structured, badly ordered tossup. (The Main Street question that began with Carol Kennicott's name is a perfect example.) Put simply, if you know how to write good questions-- factually dense questions that begin with a cool, interesting clue and end with a giveaway accessible to most anyone at a given tournament, with a progression of increasingly easy clues in between-- you'll be far less likely to write a question that's either way too hard or badly structured. The main problem on the circuit today, then, isn't that aging dinosaurs are flooding the circuit with impossible questions and scaring lots of new players and teams away. It's that far too many players simply haven't mastered the basics of question-writing. Question-writing can be fun and interesting--it isn't just a chore you need to do before playing in a tournament. I'd argue that this problem is in part a result of the circuit's growth: there are more teams and more tournaments today than there were when I began playing, so there are also more inexperienced writers and editors. And, to disagree with another point in the post that began this thread, the problem isn't that players don't get the chance to hear criticisms of their questions. (This message board hasn't exactly been a source of constructive criticism on question-writing in the past, and players have always been more likely to repeat nasty comments than to provide useful advice.) The problem, as I see it, is that the good questions and the good packets are often drowned in a sea of mediocre questions. If most of what you hear leaves a lot to be desired, then how will you know the levels you can aspire to? In any case, I've babbled on far longer than I intended. My goal isn't to make sweeping generalizations about the low quality of questions on the circuit (I'm not nearly arrogant enough to do that), or to minimize the issues of grad student involvement and question difficulty. There's always room for improvement on the circuit, on a lot of different fronts--and I suspect that there always will be. In a few years, I'm sure that people will still be complaining that questions are too hard, that dinosaurs are taking over the circuit, that question quality is too low, and that quizbowl is in serious danger if those trends continue. --edc
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