Re: COTKU comments

• From: thefool75
• Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2001 07:40:14 -0700
• Message-ID: <000TTG92E.000RC1S4R.12170551-quizbowl_at_...>

>I also read at COTKU as I ususally do at the
UTC >tournaments and agree with Chris's assessment
of
> the questions. Difficulty level was just about
>right for non-ACF, in my opinion. The statement
>that it
> was "worse than CBI" is silly. 90% of
the >questions were answerable by at least one out
of >the 8
> people in most rooms. Bonuses
had an easy 10 >points and a hard 30, with some
exceptions. 

I think you've completely missed my
point. I have no problem with the difficulty level.
There is nothing wrong with easy questions if they are
well-written. Unfortunately, it is much, much harder to write
good easy questions than good hard ones. My problem
with the tournament is that it was advertised as A.
ACF-style academic rounds, they were not, Ben Lea's rounds
were not academic, they were close to half trash, B.
trashy giveaways on questions which had no legitimate
clues before the end--those then become trash questions
as well. If a clue is not uniquely identifying--i.e.
this empiricist philosopher was influenced by
Aristotle etc., then it is not a clue (I'll grant that two
non-identifying clues together can constitute one uniquely
identifying clue, but that was not the case
here).

> I do find it interesting as a moderator,
>however, that comments during matches such as >"Can you
believe these questions?" usually come >from the team
that is behind in the match or is >doing worse
than
> expected at the tournament. Human nature, I
>suppose.

When Kentucky fails to win a tournament that they are
easily the best team at, it means either someone else
played out of their mind, or that the questions
penalized good teams. No offense to Raj and FAU
intended.

Nathan Freeburg