Re: ICT Comments

jpahk <*no_reply_at_yahoogroups.com*> · Mon, 14 Apr 2003 10:18:46 -0000

--- In quizbowl_at_yahoogroups.com, plitvak_17 <no_reply_at_y...> wrote:
> More importantly, I want to examine Joon's (whom I greatly respect 
as a player and a person) points about the questions. Essentially, he 
seems to be making an argument very recently found in an Onion Point-
Counterpoint. People bring many examples and outline ways of reparing 
the problem, and Joon responds with "no, the questions were fine, 
really."

as i said, i was only posting the ultra-condensed version of my full 
thoughts. more explicitly, i thought the questions were, on the 
whole, excellent; and even many of the tossups that got particular 
mention as being bad were, i thought, pretty good. continuous, 
triangle inequality, and rainbow are in this category. not so much 
township, wasps, hyksos, since these TUs began with what actually 
probably were the best-known facts about the answers. or, in the case 
of township, what the hell was this question all about in the first 
place? soweto is a very well-known acronym, but more to the point, 
it's not at all clear to me what kind of substantive clues are even 
possible for such a tossup. *shrug*

perhaps the point i am trying to make is that many of the questions 
which people have groused began with "giveaways" really didn't; they 
began with clues that, sure, maybe some people knew, but (presumably) 
they got easier as the tossup went on.

> From what I can understand, his (and Josh Allen's) arguments) are 
something to the effect of "Its inherent in the timed format that a 
larger proportion of questions have speedchecks, because you can't 
put as many clues in." Personally, I think this is an affront to NAQT 
as an organization and timed questions as a means for testing 
knowledge.

this is mind-boggling. yes, that is essentially my argument; and 
while you can question its relevance in this discussion, i think it's 
preposterous to question whether it is true. the important thing to 
note is that it is a *relative* matter. a *larger* proportion of 
questions will come down to buzzer races, because you won't be able 
to distinguish *as finely* because there can't be *as many* clues. 
(phew. overuse of *'s.) that's not to say that NAQT has made, or 
should make, that proportion actually "large" (for whatever value of 
large you might like to define) for the ICT; just larger than, say, 
ACF nationals. is this an affront to NAQT? i can't imagine that it is.

> Its not mutually exclusive that questions can be well-structured 
and times. No one is trying to turn NAQT into ACF. The questions 
should be shorter, the game is different.

well, actually, i think the people who are unilaterally declaring 
which clues should *never* be allowed in a tossup lead-in kind of are 
trying to turn this into ACF. come on, that's just silly. yes, 
everybody knows that some kinds of clues (e.g. apprentice bookbinder) 
suck ass and shouldn't be used at all. but who's to say what clues 
are well-known and less well-known for a particular tossup answer? it 
depends on the answer, naturally--but not only that, it depends on 
when you (as the writer) want the question to be answered in most 
games/a typical game/a game between top teams.

fundamentally, i stand by my point that in a timed format, you simply 
don't have the luxury of making the first clue of each tossup as hard 
as everybody who's posted recently seems to want (and, truth be told, 
as hard as i'd prefer them myself). if you did, then you'd end up 
with a lot of matches ending after 18 or so tossups, which i don't 
think anybody wants. so you have more questions being answered 
earlier, which means against a good team you have to be prepared to 
buzz at any point in any tossup. again, that's not a bad thing. it's 
just different (from ACF).

there's another factor at work which i'm not sure anybody has 
mentioned in this thread but about which i've been thinking a lot 
recently. (yes, i think about quizbowl too much.) ACF (which is sort 
of my shorthand for "clue-based") tends to make you more sure of your 
buzzes--you generally know when you know it. (which makes it all the 
more mind-boggling that nathan managed to neg seventy-odd times at 
regionals, but that's another story.) i think of this as being a good 
thing, but a seemingly unavoidable corollary is that most of the 
clues, therefore, sound too hard (and sometimes uninteresting), 
because most of the time, you're not buzzing in on them (so you don't 
know them). so playing ACF, even on good question sets and even if 
you are a good player, can make you feel stupid or bored or 
frustrated. this is a problem and i don't know of a good solution. 
NAQT, i think, doesn't have this problem, because more of the clues 
are actually buzzable to those who have less-than-encyclopedic 
knowledge.

> Aside from the giveaway-begun questions, think about the questions 
that have 2 lines of vagaries followed by a speedcheck (like the 
Henry Adams question) Its not hard to put a clue instead of 
saying ""he wandered around Europe, he was sad..." There is so much 
information available with the Internet, it hardly takes any time; 
there is no excuse.

okay, here i can actually agree for the most part. this kind of 
question really is annoying, in any format.

> Now, if NAQT wants to admit that they aren't in the business of 
differentiating teams by knowledge (as Matt Bruce seems to imply in 
his copious blog posts), then R should just end this argument right 
now and say ""yeah, the national championship should be decided by 
speedchecks." But it seems to me like NAQT is not willing to admit 
this; I think that fundamentally they share the basic sentiments of 
Subash, Ezequiel, et al that they want their product to be as good as 
possible.

once again, paul, you are conflating "more speed-based/less knowledge-
based" with "inferior." it's not. you (and i) may like it less, but 
that doesn't make it a worse product.

you raise a good point, though, and one which i'm sort of curious 
about: does NAQT itself (or its head honchos, if there is no 
unanimous voice) feel that the ICT questions adequately fulfilled 
NAQT's goals for the set? my own impression was that they were a very 
good packet set based on the parameters of what i had come to expect 
from NAQT. that's one of the many reasons i enjoyed the ICT so much.

joon