While I agree with the spirit of keeping difficulty reasonably
accessible for incoming players...well, I question the wisdom of the
guideline of an answer's acceptability solely being whether it's
appeared in an ACF regionals packet before. ACF and hardcore-style
rounds have had a problem in the past with either chasing their own
tails, and I wonder if this policy might not just be carrying the
mistakes of the past along.
Edmund
--- In quizbowl_at_yahoogroups.com, suby10 <no_reply_at_y...> wrote:
> 1. When trying to assess the appropriate difficulty level for a
> tossup answer, consult Regionals packets from 1999 onward. If
your
> answer has not come up AT LEAST twice as a prior tossup or bonus
> answer, then you should almost certainly not be writing a tossup
with
> said answer.
>
> It is for this reason that an individual, having read Balzac in an
> freshman or sophmore class but being new to the game, will be able
to
> discern that a tossup on Pere Goriot or Cousine Bette is greatly
> preferrable to a tossup on Lost Illusions or The Wild Ass' Skin.
> Note that this is not a value judgment on the works themselves,
only
> their gettability at the Regionals level.