As I swore I wouldn't get dragged into the post-tournament discussion, and as I have dinner plans to attend to shortly, I'll try to be brief in answering the points that Mr. Fine mentioned in his post. 1) The use of five of my packets out of the 15 (not 14) that were sent out: I received in the ballpark of around 25 packets from teams around the country. Of these, at least half were immediately beyond the point of salvaging in their entirety, usually due to incredibly bad writing technique, inapproprate difficulty, or a combination of the two. That left me with about 12 packets, of which all were used in some form this weekend. Believe me when I tell you that I squeezed everything possible out of those packets that I could without seriously endangering the overall quality and difficulty of the tournament. I really didn't like to have to use as many of my own questions as I had to, and especially didn't like having to write more questions on the last day of editing just to fill out the set, but there was no way to get around it. Had I used more of what was sent to me, I undoubtedly would have been criticized for question quality, so to me that fact that five rounds of high quality questions were written by me was definitely the better route to go. 2) Recycling of topics/underrepresentation of topics: Yes, some topics can up multiple times, and yes, some topics (Hemingway, Faulkner) didn't come up at all. The reason is because I only had my questions and those sent to me to work with, and these were the topics asked about. I did as much as I could with my own contributions to the set to be a broad as possible, but some things just couldn't be gotten to. As far as I can see it, my options were to 1) do what I did, and get blasted for it, 2) use inferior questions from sets that really should not be used, and get blasted for the low quality, as you would undoubtedly do, or 3) write even more of my own questions, and get blasted for that. I thought the way I chose (using every question I could from those who submitted rounds) was the best of the options. 3) Pyramid structure: Yes, like every tournament that has ever existed, there were a few questions in which the editor had a different idea than others as to which clues were easier than others. On the whole, I think that I got it right, with the exception of a handful of examples, and that pyramid structure in this set was better than most tournaments. I'm human; give me a break if I got a few of them wrong. 4) Factual errors: See the above human comment. I think this tournament set had fewer factual errors than just about any tournament you'll find, but 100% accuracy is beyond my powers. 5) Formatting: This is news to me. I sent the sets out the Sunday night before the tournament, and asked each of the hosts to look through it and tell me if there was anything that needed to be fixed, and they were. During my time reading at Knoxville, I didn't hear of a single problem experienced by any of the moderators, and I didn't notice any glaring problems with the readability of the text. If this really was a problem, I'd like for anyone who was actually reading this weekend to let me know, as I'd like to fix those for next year. In closing, I'd like to say something about constructive criticism. To me this implies that the one doing to criticism provide at least an idea of how these problems should be fixed. I would encourage all of you reading this to return to the above 5 sections, and ask, what could I have done to improve the situation, and if you have any possible solutions, please let me know, as I am planning to do this again next year. To me, the criticisms in Mr. Fine's post were directed at things were the result of unavoidable human imperfection or things that could only be changed by creating greater problems. Any posts or emails proposing constructive solutions will be read with great interest by me. Kelly
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