In response to Mr. Adelman's point that a mean or median figure for the fields was not meaningful in itself because a lot of low-end teams choose to play NAQT exclusively, I took a look at the numbers for teams who played both Division I NAQT Sectionals and one or both of ACF Fall and ACF Regionals last year. Part of the working hypothesis here is that just about everyone agrees that NAQT Sectionals are of appropriate difficulty, and thus it constitutes a good baseline for gauging the difficulty of other tournaments. I found that the mean points per thousand available (PPK) for teams who played both NAQT Sectionals and ACF Regionals was 284 at NAQT and 270 at ACF, a 5% decrease from NAQT to ACF. 10 teams scored better at ACF Regionals than at NAQT Sectionals, and 15 scored worse. Under the hypothesis that analyzing these teams is the best way to gauge difficulty, this shows that ACF Regionals is somewhat more difficult than NAQT Sectionals. The mean PPK for teams who played both NAQT Sectionals and ACF Fall was 259 at NAQT and 330 at ACF, a 28% increase from NAQT to ACF. 18 teams scored better at ACF Fall than at NAQT Sectionals, and 5 scored worse. Under the above hypothesis, this shows that ACF Fall is much less difficult than NAQT Sectionals. The data are below if anyone else wants to do something with them. Some notes: I assigned A, B, etc to teams from the same school based on their ordering in PPK only (but with D1 teams always coming before D2), in order to provide the most logical comparison across tournaments. I did not include teams who played D2 at NAQT Sectionals in the calculations for ACF Fall and Regionals, since the ACF tournaments were all held on one question set and, with a single exception, as one division. Sectionals vs. Regionals http://www.hsquizbowl.org/regionals.html Sectionals vs. Fall http://www.hsquizbowl.org/fall.html Date on all teams who played Sectionals in either division and played at least one ACF tournament http://www.hsquizbowl.org/data.html
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