Re: TRASHionals Remarks

• From: cooterchekov
• Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 12:47:51 -0700
• Message-ID: <000TCHLR7.000HDAE98.12170551-quizbowl_at_...>

I was happy with the general distribution
of
questions this year, even though a few sports did
seem
heavy...but on the other hand, if you look at how much of
the
population pays attention to car racing, top 40, and
hip-hop
vs. the portion that watches hockey and listens
to
sounds of the 70's and 80's, it
probably
squares.

I especially was happy at the relative
distribution
of sci-fi relative to fantasy, comic book,
and
gaming questions; this too more closely matches
the
distribution with which people pay attention to
those
areas.

The questions were hard. They were, sometimes,
way
hard. On the other hand, I'd say that TRASH matched
the
questions to the top end of the field really
well.

I
mean, regionals-level questions are supposed to
be
matched to the middle of the field, in order to
produce
discrete rankings from top to bottom and, rather
than
determine who 1-2-3-4 are, determine which teams are at
the
top and which teams are in the middle of the
field,
i.e. which ones should get nationals bids and
which
shouldn't; while nationals-level questions should be
focused
on determine which teams are the best of
the
best.

Furthermore, comparing this TRASHionals to previous ones
--
I've been to all four -- this one had the
strongest
field overall. On top of that, I'd say that of the
four
nationals this year, TRASHionals did the best of
picking
which teams in the country to invite. The bottom end
of
the field was a set of teams I'd call, at worst,
at
the national median. 

The top end
was
scary.

Edmund

By the way, what's up with all these


 thingies?