Dear Folks: Michigan Academic Competitions is pleased to announce our annual Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Tournament, which will take place Saturday 17 January 2004, the Saturday immediately before Martin Luther King Day, on the campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where the weather in January often strikes visitors from Sakatchewan and Manitoba as warm and balmy. As always, this will be an academic tournament with timed rounds and NAQT-style rules. Question difficulty will be comparable to past MLK tournaments, mid-level somewhere between NAQT and ACF regionals, suitable for both experienced teams and beginners. Our annual Ann B. Davis trash tournament will follow on Sunday as usual, and a fuller announcement of it will come along here in a while. CONTACTS: If you have questions about logistics, eligibility or money, talk to Tournament Director Mike Philpy (mphilpy [at] umich [dot] edu). If you have a packet, or questions about your packet, possible help with question writing or offers of enormous bribes, talk to Head Editor Adam Kemezis (akemezis [at] umich [dot] edu). Packets should be submitted as RTF files if humanly possible. If this is not possible, MS Word files are also fine. The goal is to have something that Word for Macintosh can make sense of. In practice this more or less eliminates Word Perfect, near as I've ever been able to figure out. The third and least preferable option is to submit packets as text in the body of an e-mail. If you do this, for the love of God don't use tabs or other formatting. If you are running a tournament that same weekend and are interested in a packet swap, e-mail Adam Kemezis at above address. ELIGIBILITY: This tournament is for current college or university students, undergraduate or graduate. If you are taking any course that could contribute to a degree program at the institution you'll be playing for, or if you are doing degree work but not taking courses, chances are you're fine. For specifics, see the NAQT eligibility rules at: http://www.naqt.com/collegiate-eligibility.html If field size permits, exceptions may be made to these rules. FEE STRUCTURE: Base fee for first team from a given school: $90 Base fee for each additional team from the same school: $85 Each functioning buzzer system you bring: -$5 (max 2 per school) First time your school has ever attended: -$10/team You're coming more than 500 miles: -$20/team Packet submitted by Sunday 30 November: -$30 Packet submitted by Sunday 14 December: -$15 Packet submitted by Sunday 28 December: -$5 Packet submitted by Sunday 4 January: $0 Packet submitted by Sunday 11 January: +$10 Packet submitted thereafter: +$25 Packet submitted entirely in Finnish: All fees waived** Minimum fee per team: $50 Hard copy of questions (after the tournament) $20 **Discount not available to native Finnish speakers, who may however obtain the same discount by submitting a packet in Albanian. Teams from foreign countries may pay in the currency of their home country at an exchange rate of one to one with U.S. Dollars. QUESTION SUBMISSION: We will be following the same distribution we always do, which is: Subject TU/B Literature 4/4 History 4/4 Science 5/4 Current Events 3/3 Fine Arts 3/4 Geography and Soc. Sci. 4/4 Myth, Religion, Philosophy 3/3 Popular Culture 3/3 General Knowledge 1/1 We are not laying down any specific requirements for distribution within categories, but we ask teams to use common sense. If all of your science is about chemistry and all your literature is 20th-century British, you won't hear too many of those questions read and your packet may be sent back to you. Teams that have less experience in writing questions may want to consult the Michigan Memorandum on question writing at: http://www.umich.edu/~uac/mac/rules/memorandum2002.html along with its appendix at: http://www.umich.edu/~uac/mac/rules/appendix2002.html The appendix also includes the packet distribution set forth above, if you lose this announcement but somehow still have the URL. We have a few requests to make of all teams as well: -- Please remember that this is a timed tournament. Tossups should not be more than five lines of 10-to-12-point type, or 500 characters tops. Bonuses should not have more than three parts unless they have one-word questions or answers. Bonus parts should not be longer than two lines. -- Please keep the formatting as simple as your aesthetic sensibilities will bear. In particular, please do not use tabs or spaces to line things up. --Please put all tossup and bonus answers on separate lines from the questions. --When underlining the minimum necessary part of your answer, please use underscores as follows: Ernest _Hemingway_ rather than underlining or capitalization. --Please no questions on spelling, flags or computation. --Please no one-or-two-clue "for a quick ten points" tossups. --One visual bonus per packet is acceptable, as long as no color copying is required. Audio bonuses are right out. Ulfactory bonuses even more so. --If you have any questions about any formatting or difficulty issues or anything else related to your packet, please drop an e-mail to Adam Kemezis at above address. Don't be a stranger, y'hear? --Sample packets from last year's MLK will be posted on the web shortly for use as examples. QUESTION-WRITING COACHING Last year we got the idea of taking teams that had less experience in packet writing and pairing them up with someone from our own club who could look over their questions before submission, give them tips on difficulty and style. Nobody died of this, and the resulting packets were both good quality and resembled what the submitting team had in mind more than would otherwise be the case. Therefore, we would like to continue the experiment this year, subject of course to some limitations as to how many people on our team are prepared to participate. Please contact Adam Kemezis at above address if you feel you could benefit from such help. BASIC LOGISTICS: If you're wondering how to get to Ann Arbor and where to stay, eat, park and shop, there are some answers on the web at: http://www.umich.edu/~uac/mac/faq/part2.html More specific inquiries should be directed to Mike Philpy at above address. Yours in the hope of a good crowd and a great show come January, Kemezis
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