I can say that on my team, we often do keep our own individual stats (not as a matter of boasting, but rather because we've found it effective to write down which questions we did well or poorly on in order to figure out which distribution areas we might want to go earlier or later on than we did at the tournament in question). We agreed on our own stats, and when we compared them with the official NAQT stats, we found that there were a total of 2 questions misattributed (net) throughout the course of the tournament. Over 15 rounds and around 120 tossups, for scorekeepers unfamiliar with the people on our team and who are not always working with buzzer systems that make it easy for anybody except the moderator to tell who was ringing in to only make 2 mistakes is remarkable, and while of course I'd prefer to see no mistakes, I have to think that 2 mistakes is well below any reasonable acceptable error rate for that type of tournament. Perhaps the error rate was greater for some other teams, but at the very least I believe that if the greatest error for any of the approximately 240 players ended up being on the order of 5 points, then this is nothing short of remarkable, especially when you consider that even 5 points only means about 7 or 8 mistakes over the course of the entire tournament in the worst case. Anyway, congratulations to Wash U on running a great tournament, and while of course I'd never like to see my individual score 5 points lower than it should be, I'll also say that 5 points is not a major difference - does anybody really believe that a player who scored 24 PPG at ICTs is a better player than one who scored 19 PPG? For that matter, I would think most people treat individual stats as being approximate to begin with. -Charles Steinhardt
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