COTKU comments

Steinhice · Wed, 24 Oct 2001 18:28:01 -0700

First comment: constructive criticism is always
welcomed here, and everything posted so far fits that
category in my eyes, so no offense is taken on this end.
Nor is any intended in my comments.

After the
first year's COTKU, we realized that it's just too
doggone hard to run a packet submission tournament so
early in the academic year, and we switched to trying
to generate our own material. This too has its
drawbacks. The previous two years, I had major crises in
real life surface not-so-conveniently in October and
barely got usable questions put together in
time.

 This year Rolla agreed to carry the load, with
Rolla's players writing the questions and Ben Lea editing
them. For anyone who doubts Ben's credentials, I refer
you to the first few years of the late lamented
WesselMania at NC State, which Ben wrote most or all of each
year. I was not originally planning to be involved in
the editing, having edited a high school tournament
the previous week, but Ben suffered a shoulder injury
that made typing painful. So I helped out during the
final edit, especially on the tossups. I also wrote
most of the history questions and about half the
literature; the fine hard-working folks at Rolla had written
questions that leaned heavily toward non-life sciences.
(Hey, it's an engineering school.) 

Whenever I
read last weekend, I caught editing flaws in the
questions -- typos, duplicates, awkward phrasings -- that I
should have caught before. For those, I apologize.
Still, I've seen plenty worse.

The one area where
I'd take issue with comments posted so far is the
level of difficulty. I refer you to the COTKU
announcement: "As with past years of COTKU, we will make every
effort to make this both a challenging tournament for
veteran circuit teams and accessible for novice or
inexperienced teams." COTKU is early in the season, the first
event of the year for most teams, and designed as a
warm-up for the tougher tournaments we host -- ACF
Regionals (and this year ACF Fall), NAQT Sectionals, and
the Moon Pie Classic in April. 

 The scores
would indicate that we hit mighty close to the intended
level. Earlier rounds were easier by design -- note that
in Rounds 1-3 there were 7 matches where the winning
team scored 350 or more points, while it only happened
twice in Rounds 4-7. In Division II, several teams
topped 200 points in Round 1, but in Rounds 4-7 the
typical winning score in D II was under 150. We used the
tougher Berkeley rounds later in the day, so by Round 10
even Division I matches had scores like 120-55,
110-90, and 120-80. (And there were no weak Division I
teams on hand.)

 In other words, the questions
were not as hard as many would like, and that was
intentional. We also included "trashademic" clues at the end
of tossups where possible. Why? Because we had some
brand spankin' new schools in attendance, and we'd like
them to continue in the game. Sometimes there's a big
difference for a novice team between losing 270-20 and
losing 270-80. 

For you veterans, if you're ready
for some more rigorously questions now, then come see
us on Nov. 3 at the ACF Fall Tournament.