Re: He's done it again. 1/2

darwins_bulldog1138 · Sun, 03 Dec 2000 17:38:10 -0800

>>In short, WHY DO WE HATE HIM?
<<

I offer the following as an answer to a direct
question asked by Andy, not as a spontaneous
rant.

First off, to answer the prior post, Chip Beall is all
of the following:
-The executive director of
Questions Unlimited, which sells question sets to
tournaments and runs various events such as QuizNet and the
monthly Twenty Questions. They also used to run a
disk-based competition, QUEST, in competition with KMO, but
no longer do so.
-The president of the National
Academic Association, a shell organization which runs the
NAC (below).
-The director of the National
Academic Championship, a national high school quizbowl
tournament of some kind which was televised as the Texaco
Star NAC through 1994.

As far as I can tell, he
"writes" the great majority of the questions sold by QU
and used at the NAC.

Here's a short list of
problems, from least to most serious as I see it.
-He
makes outrageous claims, such as saying that the
schools that win his tournament are obviosuly the best in
the nation, that his is the premiere event for high
schoolers, etc, when quite obviously all but a miniscule
fraction of the top 15-25 high school teams do not attend
his tournament. He also calls himself "America's most
prolific question writer."
-He has a tendency to throw
results he doesn't like down the memory hole--witness the
elimination of Grand Junction's scores from last year's NAC
stats.
-The NAC is needlessly expensive, in terms of temporal
and financial commitment, for what it offers. It
requires missing two days of school in addition to
comitting two weekend days, and the fee is around the
four-figure range; all of this for a FOUR game preliminary
schedule--when even the worst one-day HS invitationals offer
five guaranteed games, and the standard is quickly
becoming seven. It's a two-weekend commitment for teams
which qualify for the championship playoffs in
LA.
-The NAC is run in a four-quarter format which does
not reflect other top-of-the-line HS competitions and
discourages college play by competitors. You think
variable-value boni are bad? Welcome to variable-value tossups
and progressive boni.
-The NAC playoffs are
single-elimination, with top teams (by total points, not record, if
that will give the teams Beall likes the higher seed)
given byes out of the first round. The smallest phase
of the tournament, LA, qualifies as many teams for
the uber-finals as the large phases combined, and
seeding for the championship playoffs is haphazard at
best. 

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