R. wrote:
"Why "ostensible"? Every question that appears in an NAQT packet is
seen by at least three editors, usually a playtest group, and
occasionally our entire difficulty check panel."
I have a question about playtesting. The above suggests (to me at
least) that individual questions are playtested, but are entire
packets playtested after they are assembled?
Occasionally (maybe once or twice per NAQT tournament) I'll hear two
toss-ups from a subcategory that should not come up more than once or
twice per tournament _in the same packet_. The SCT had perhaps the
most blatant example of this I've seen to date: two toss-ups on
early Italian Renaissance architects in the same packet.
Now this certainly helped our team, but it wasn't right. I think
that NAQT should playtest the assembled packets (if they don't do so
already) to ensure that meta-distribution errors such as the above
are avoided.
It's not a big thing, but I think it's quite correctable.
-Adam