Re: PB10 Comments

anth757 · Mon, 29 Jan 2001 09:19:58 -0800

I thought Penn Bowl this year was not nearly
perfect, as some have said, nor was it a complete
disaster, as that one post stated.
 First, there's the
aforementioned long delay. It is not so bad that the packets
were switched up, that's something that could easily
happen by accident, but that's still no reason to make
us wait a very long time while deciding to use the
back-up packet and the unread questions from round 13
(the packet that was to be read). This caused Penn to
decide to not have one round of the playoffs because the
tournament was running very late. So why couldn't them have
used the playoff packet that wasn't read as a
replacement round? The supplementary round was only 20/18 and
since various people have heard various questions,
teams were not competing on exactly the same questions
which is inconsistent. 
 Second, I think the
question difficulty was a bit easy sometimes. An example
would be one on _War and Peace_ that started out with a
quote about Napoleon and saying that it had 500
characters. Having never read the book, I got the tossup just
because I knew it took place in the Napoleonic era and it
had a lot of characters, I don't think that question
awarded more knowledgeable players who were sitting on it
thinking that can't be the answer because it's too easy.
I'm sure that's not the only instance that happened,
another one would the Chavez question. I suppose that
some could say it's part of the charm for Penn
Bowl.
 Third, I really didn't like the bracket my team
was placed in. My team plays GW, Georgetown, and
Johns Hopkins a lot already, and I was hoping to play
teams from other areas because one of the biggest perks
of going to Penn Bowl is to play teams that I would
not regularly play. 
 Fourth, the thirty minute
lunch was pretty annoying because there was already a
huge line in the food court and most people didn't
make it in 30 minutes so it wasn't effective as a time
saver.
 Finally, there were some inconsistencies in
moderating. We had no idea about the index cards until the
second day, which was interesting since a protest on the
first day wasn't resolved with the index cards. There
was some confusion as to how ties was to be broken
the first day also, which is something that should
have been made clear.

Well, I did enjoy Penn
Bowl overall, and the few problems did not ruin my
experience, it was just a bit frustrating that it
happened.

Andy Hu
MAQT