> Lately I have been going over ACF Nationals > packets, and I have to say that a few rounds this weekend were > bordering on ACF Nationals difficulty (Indiana's packet comes to > mind). I'd better address this, since Athens State wasn't the only team that felt this way. Though I wouldn't have compared it to even the easiest ACF Nationals Round from the past 5 years when I submitted it, there is something to be said when a match between the top two teams at a Regionals tournament does not break 400 combined points. There are a few reasons that I could easily chalk up to teams making this comparison without dismissing teams' valid complaints, but I don't think it boils down to just those two reasons (which are slight canonicity differences between regions (I actually have a harder time with the Americana clues when I hear rounds written by teams from other regions, while I know that if you play a lot of qb in the midwest, you tend to hear more heavy science and world-focus clues than other regions, and thus become used to them) and people shutting off their brains when they hear a foreign word or two (much as I do when I hear a trashy clue)). After 5 years, I'm still learning to write at given difficulties. I've missed the target difficulty for a tournament by a mile before, but for this one my intention was to pick a few choice harder questions to challenge the top teams (I did not think I was picking more than 3 or 4 of these), and for the rest of the packet I was selecting answers given a lot of note-space from high school classes or from survey classes from my undergraduate days (but actually more of the former). Now, you're not going to learn about Hartree-Fock Operators in high school (I would have thought you would in upper level chemistry courses--I did), but by using that clue in the first sentence, my intention was to reward teams that knew the most about molecular orbitals (In 5 cases I know about, mo's are discussed in high school chemistry classes--was the giveaway too hard)? I was approached by an expert in the field after that round and told that he actually never heard about MO Theory, which really confused me. Sometimes I do intend to write mostly challenging questions--see last year's ACF Nationals round for specifics, but this case was not one of those times. OK, I'm through apologizing for my round. Without seeing average combined scores for all the packets in all regions, I'd like to ask that people who thought that this round was anomalously difficult compared to others (personally, I thought Berkeley's round was hardest) email me privately at castrioti at yahoo dot com to let me know where I went wrong. In discussion, though, I'm mainly interested in these topics, that are larger than one round, but that my writing could benefit from having answered: 1: As long as question length specifications are met, do people like questions in which there are 10-15 short bursts of information, arranged from hardest to easiest (I don't mean in the form of a simple list) or drawn out clues that have to be explained in sentences (maybe room for only 5 per tossup)? I'd lean towards the former. 2: As long as the asked-for distribution and overall difficulty are satisfied, how much new material (meaning, material not previously found in quiz bowl questions) do people think is appropriate to introduce as clues in a tossup? 1-3 of the 15 or so clues? 3-6? More (realizing most will not have heard most quizbowl questions--I certainly haven't)? I'd say at most 5% at Fall, 15% at Regionals, 25% at Nationals. This question stems from a year of thinking about Subash's guidelines for question writing. 3: Do people think that, as long as the asked-for distribution and overall difficulty are satisfied, "world-focus" questions (lit, history, and social science questions on Asia, Africa, the Americas, etc) could be thought of as subdivisions equal in importance to classics or Americana? I would say that they are, and should be (for the purpose of QB Questions--In the real world I think world-focus stuff is actually more important). Lastly, this was the best Regionals tournament ever. Way to go, everyone, and especially Raj and editors. --Wesley
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