Princeton Fall College Tournament

Jordan Boyd-Graber <*jordanbg_at_jordanbg.yahoo.invalid*> · Tue, 09 Aug 2005 14:50:14 -0000

The Princeton College Bowl Club is pleased to to announce its Fall
packet submission tournament (amusing name to be determined).

The tournament will be held on Saturday, December 3, 2005 and is open
to all teams affiliated with a college and other teams at my
discretion.

Dan Benediktson and Jordan Boyd-Graber will be co-editing, and Dan
Benediktson is the Tournament Director.  We plan to have a single
round robin followed by a bracketed round robin playoffs, but this may
change depending on the number of teams. We're setting a preliminary
cap of 15 teams.

Fees are:
First team: $100
Each additional team: $80
Working buzzer discount: -$10/buzzer
Minimum fee per team: $60
Travel discounts are also available at my discretion.

Packets:
All teams (A and B) are expected to submit a packet in order to play,
but B teams may request an exemption. All exemptions will be handled
on a case-by-case basis and will most likely result in a request for a
partial packet rather than a full exemption.
Each packet must be 25/25 (tossups/bonuses) and should be
approximately the difficulty of ACF Fall. Feel free to refer to
Princeton's Buzzerfest 2004 packets (available at the Stanford
Archive) for a good idea of difficulty and style, but be sure to err
on the easier side in answer selection.

Deadlines for packets to be submitted are as follows:
October 14: -$40
October 28: -$20
November 4: -$10
November 11: no penalty
November 18: +$20
November 25: +$40
After November 25: +$50 and a team may only enter at my discretion.

The packet distribution is to be
Literature [5/5] (At least 1/1 American, 1/1 British, 1/1 European,
1/1 World)
History [5/5] (At least 2/1 or 1/2 American, 2/1 or 1/2 European, 1/1
World)
Science [5/5] (At least 1/1 Bio, 1/1 Chem, 1/1 Physics, 1/1
Astro/Earth/Computer/Math)
Religion/Mythology/Philosophy [3/3] (1/1 Each)
Fine Arts [2/2] (1/1 Art, 1/1 Music)
Social Science [2/2]
Geography [1/1]
Your Choice [1/1] The Your Choice category should be purely academic
and should NOT include Geography. Any other category is fair game, and
cross-category questions are encouraged.
Trash [1/1]

Please do not write 30/20/10 bonuses or binary bonuses.
Tossups should generally be 5-8 lines in 12-pt Times New Roman and
bonus parts should be about 2 lines.

Formatting: Keep questions ordered by category (headers for each
category are fine).
All acceptable answers should be underlined and bold, and answers
should be on a new line and prefaced by "ANSWER: ".
Bonus questions should be prefaced by the question value in
parentheses, as in:
Some bonus
(10) Some question.
ANSWER: _Some Answer_
You can of course refer to the Buzzerfest 2004 packets mentioned above
as a reference for tossup/bonus formatting.  Please submit your packet
to dbenedik (at) princeton (dot) edu as an RTF or Microsoft Word
document, or use Jerome:

http://jbg.princeton.edu:8080/jerome/

Jerome is still an experimental system, but it does have some
advantages.  It will allow you to get instant feedback on questions
and to watch what the editors do to your packet.  It does require that
the questions be formatted in LaTeX, although an RTF importer is in
the works and should be finished by the end of the summer.

Send an e-mail to dbenedik (at) princeton (dot) edu to register or to
ask any questions you may have about the tournament.

Dan Benediktson and Jordan Boyd-Graber
Princeton College Bowl