Re: Ken from Utah, the 18-time Jeopardy champion......

grapesmoker <*no_reply_at_yahoogroups.com*> · Fri, 02 Jul 2004 00:01:23 -0000

> Basically, I'm not saying that questions should keep getting harder 
> and more obscure to the point that no one at all knows the answers; 
> I'm saying that the way the questions are set up now, the only 
people 
> who can reasonably be expected to answer a lot of the questions are 
> people that have hung around quizbowl for several years.  I think 
it 
> would be better if answers themselves were more accessible and 
> actually represented what is actually learned in academic settings; 
a 
> well-written, pyramidal question should still be able to 
> differentiate between a knowledgable team and a non-knowledgeable 
> team even on a fairly common subject.  Now, I know that question 
> writers aren't lazy, they put a ton of time and effort into their 
> questions, but I think that the old axiom holds true: it's easier 
to 
> write a hard question than it is an easy one.  There are ways to 
make 
> this game more accessible to all players while still maintaining a 
> high level of competition, it just takes more work.

How much is "a lot" of the questions? I would say that if 18 out of 
20 tossups are answered in a match between two middling teams, that's 
good, although of course this number will depend on the tournament. 
Also, how will you decide what is "actually represented in academic 
setting?" If I take a class on international European history, does 
that mean it's OK for me to write a question on the Peace of 
Karlowitz, despite the fact that most people will never have heard of 
it outside that sort of class? Are the novels of Kobo Abe or the 
poetry of Heine ok? I bet I can find a class where those are covered. 
My point is that at almost any university, you're bound to find some 
class where the topic you're writing on comes up on a regular basis. 
So the criterion you propose seems essentially moot to me because 
almost any answer would satisfy it.

This is why ideas such as "the canon" are useful. The canon doesn't 
rule supreme, but it does provide a good guide to what gets asked and 
what doesn't, and while the canon continually expands, normally it 
does so at a reasonable pace, allowing people to catch up. If you 
start at novice tournaments and proceed to harder questions in your 
practices, you can quickly get a feel for what is in the canon and 
what is not, and the truth is that the core of it does not change 
very much. Reading some novels by Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy, as 
well as a couple Shakespeare plays guarantees you at least a couple 
tossups in every tournament. A passing familiarity with history will 
allow you to pick up many history questions out there. In my first 
year, I basically got by in history by using knowledge gleaned from 
10th and 11th grades, which is sufficient to recognize about 80% of 
the stuff out there.

To wrap it up, I don't agree with the assertion that experience is 
the only thing that matters in QB, or that the vast majority of 
questions out there are somehow inaccessible to incoming freshmen. 
There are tournaments and question sets for every population of 
players out there, and the opportunity to get better is ever-present.

Jerry