Ok, before we get our panties in a ruffle and this degenerates into flaming... I was one of the head editors on the Kleist (having written about 1/4 of the tournament), and also a partial editor on the MLK. Maybe this is all my fault ;) But for a moment, allow me to retort. I will be the first person to admit that the Kleist was too hard. However, that being said, I think people feel that this was some sort of conspiracy, that we wanted to dick over weaker teams. However, let me assure you, that it was our fault due to our inexperience as editors that the questions came out that way. I have since learned that lesson, and when we put on Kleist 2, I can assure you the questions will be much more reasonable. So lets stop badmouthing the Kleist, shall we? And furthermore, the very fact that we have so many younger people who helped edit and write the Kleist and MLK is precisely what makes our team have any depth. Now, that having been said, let me speak for a moment about PennBowl, providing examples of two tossups (not verbatim), that I heard at the tournament: "His early works, Sun Stone and Moon Stone..blah blah blah Salamandra...blah blah blah resigned as ambassador to India..." (Octavio Paz) "Elected by the Everyman's library as the top novel of the 20th century..." (Ulysses) Most people will agree that the idea of the pyramidal structure (remember that?) is to reward more knowledge earlier. Now, having taken an entire seminar on Joyce, I can assure you that this Ulysses tossup does not reward knowledge. Even if I had gotten the tossup (Emily, on my team beat me to it...too fast for me), I would not have been happy because the tossup did not reward knowledge about the book. The Paz tossup, by contrast, I feel was a good tossup. Notice the word feel. Yes, its subjective. Fine. But its ridiculous to hide behind subjectivity as an excuse. My complaint is not with the difficulty of the answers, but the difficulty fo the questions. Pennbowl is supposed to be a faster tournament which is accessible. My complaint is with two aspects of the tournament: A) Questions did not follow pyramidal structure. (You might think that the Ulysses tossup had a legit leadin, but if you figure out statistically how many people know it, youd most likely find it wasnt legit. In fact, not to go off on a big tangent, but I think that a leadin is legit to a degree inversely proportional to the amount of people playing on the circuit know it...) So, people who study for quizbowl like myself did not feel that knowledge was rewarded. But studying aside, lets say a weaker team had a team member who had read Ulysses. Wouldn't they also be upset if they gotten beaten to the tossup that should have started "One of its chapters has a talking bar of soap..." B)Its not clear that packets followed distribution. Now, I'm not entirely sure about this, I'd have to comb through the packets to know for sure, but this is what I suspect. I'm going to take Michigan's packet (which I helped write) as a paradigmatic example. In the first 12 TUs, there was no lit. In the first 20 tossups, there were 2 lit tossups. It seems to me like each of the big three (Science, Lit, History) should come up at least 4 times in the first 20 questions, especially if we only get to hear 20 over a round. So thats about all I have to say about this tournament. I agree with Goss that there should be a balance, but just because the better teams might have won out at Pennbowl, does not mean that Pennbowl was a epitome of a good tournament. Paul Litvak (plitvak_at_...)
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