"[1] There were a distressingly large number of typos, incorrectly spelled words, and grammatical errors. I understand that there are a large number of packets being written in a relatively short amount of time, but the errors were largely of the sort that could easily be caught using a word processor's 'flagging' features." [2] Not all of the packets were of 'standard' length. At least three rounds were missing a 28th tossup; several rounds also lacked a 26th bonus. Unfortunately, these exceptions also occurred when the matches were close, and the reasonably expected 28th tossup was nowhere to be found, necessitating the finding of an additional tossup which was 'blind' to both teams." NAQT does apologize on both counts; the packets were originally shipped including questions from a writer who was actually playing at the tournament. Hosts were asked to remove the questions from the tournament before use; this resulted in slightly uneven packets. NAQT acknowledges that this was suboptimal, but hopes that questions from packets 19 and 20 could have been substituted when they were necessary. For what it's worth, this was a purely administrative error on our [in this case, my] part: the player notified us sufficiently in advance that he would be playing. I'll also add that the primary obstacle standing between NAQT and eliminating typos, poor questions, and other problems is, honestly, a lack of writers and editors. If you think that you write better questions, on average, than NAQT, then please download our new writers kit from the website and submit a sample. If we agree that you'll raise our quality, we would be delighted to add you to our writing team. The net result is better questions for everybody! Even if you are currently playing for a university, you can write high school questions for us freeing up others to focus on the collegiate tournaments at which you'll be playing. -- R. Robert Hentzel President and Chief Technical Officer, National Academic Quiz Tournaments, LLC
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