Grad students

schnelmd · Mon, 18 Feb 2002 08:33:56 -0800

For a more serious take on the issue of graduate
students than my last post:

I think the issue of
competitive imbalance has been slightly misconceived. The
graduate students being talked about here, who potentially
mess with the competitive balance, are the grad
students who tend to be in the top 10% of the statsheet.
As of yet, there aren't any major complaints about
grad students who aren't particularly good, because
they don't seem to be especially dominant
players.

Without doing an empirical study, in my experience, the
vast majority of these "top-tier" grad students were
already in the top 10% of the scoring in most tournaments
during their undergrad years (assuming they started
playing as freshmen).

Here's my general
proposition: most quiz bowl players who are going to be very
good will be so within two or three years of starting
to play regularly on the collegiate circuit.
Furthermore, subsequent improvement over this level is usually
slight. Most grad students continue to be very good, but
very few continue to improve very much and become
really dominant (due to the demands of grad school,
marriage, whatever).

So, those players who will be
able to beat other top-tier players (grad or
undergrad) will be able to do so within 2-3 years of
beginning play.

Part of the losing in the early
years is due to lack of experience in collegiate-level
QB (hearing the many new answers), lack of
collegiate-level classes (hearing many more answers, with
background to understand many others). By the end of
undergraduate, most of these "inexperience" lackages have
dissipated, and players get better. Same as collegiate sports
- experience, training, etc all help.

So,
the good grad students stay good for longer
(obviously) but DO get beaten by good undergrads/teams of
undergrads - the ones who might well become the future good
grad students, if they choose to pursue a
post-collegiate education - all the time. Good players/teams
don't lose to very inexperienced, or just very bad,
players, and it wouldn't make sense if they
did.

Matt Schneller