Some NAQT ICT Responses (1)

ehillema · Mon, 10 Apr 2000 17:12:54 -0700

Here's the first part of a long message of
responses by one NAQT member (not necessarily speaking for
any of my co-conspirators other than myself) to some
of the points raised or statements offered in recent
posts.

Kevin Crawford writes: "The distribution seemed to be
one third trash, one third current events, and one
third general knowledge." 

The fact is, nothing
has changed regarding NAQT category distributions.
Every tournament we produce for intercollegiate play
has precisely the same tournament-wide distribution
of overall subject categories, as well as for the
major subdivisions within those categories. This is
largely the same overall distribution we have had from
our very first tournament, though I believe there has
been some small adjustments made, none recently. (I
think the percentage of current events was at one time
slightly reduced; it has certainly never gone up. Pop
Culture, Sports, and General Knowledge have also I believe
never changed a fraction of a percent.) We have a
slightly different subject distribution for our college IM
sets, with a little more Pop Culture and Sports in them
than in the intercollegiate sets. But the CFT
(formerly CCT), SCT, and ICT sets all have precisely the
same subject distribution formulas as one another and
precisely the same as they have been for the past couple of
years at least.

We do have variations in the
number of questions coming in to us from different
writers--always taking on new ones--and in who contributes to the
editing for a particular event; these things, as well as
sheer chance--as questions that meet our subject quotas
and are coded to the appropriate difficulty level are
randomly selected by our automated process to build
question packets for subsequent editing--will undoubtedly
result in the production of sets that do not all have
one uniform NAQT feel to them. But our overall
subject distribution is tightly controlled and simply
does not vary for any of our intercollegiate
events.

Pop Culture, Sports, Current Events, and General
Knowledge (the latter encompassing the truly miscellaneous
as well as questions that are mixes of the other
established subject areas) are all subject categories used by
NAQT. Each has their own unvarying percentage of NAQT
events. None of these three is a "major" category even
close to the level of the number of questions we have
for each of Literature, History, and
Science.

Kevin also writes: "Is it absolutely necessary to
eliminate anything that may have come up at another
tournament this year?"

If anyone really thinks we in
fact do this--wow. The element of truth may be that
everything else being equal we, and many of the contract
writers we have taken on, do like trying to break new
ground, whether with questions on things that are seldom
asked about, or with new information leading to
standard answers, or new twists to familiar questions.
Virtually everyone involved with NAQT has scads of
experience on the college invitational circuit, and
therefore a decent sense of what is regularly asked about,
but we have no way of taking any sort of systematic
notice of what's coming up elsewhere "this year." We've
been criticized before (talk about unrealistic
expectations!) for having the same answers come up in more than
one NAQT tournament during the same year, and have
stated in response that while we certainly try (without
100% success) to eliminate repeats _within_ a
tournament, we take no cognizance whatever of repeats across
different events, and do absolutely nothing that would
result in the content of one event being influenced by
the content of any other.

Eric
Hillemann
various NAQT titles