Thanks to all of you who posted so positively about ACF Nationals. Now I'd like to address a few of the complaints I've read on this forum so far. Hayden Hurst wrote: "3. I understand that it's ACF policy, but please consider adding pronunciation guides. I'd like to think I'm relatively good at interpreting various languages and basic science, but there were numerous times where I had no clue as how to pronounce something. If the goal of ACF is to reward the player with the most knowledge, please consider making it possible for the moderator to convey the written information correctly." Perhaps the first part was just sarcasm, but it is certainly not ACF's policy to eschew pronunciation guides. I wholeheartedly agree that there should have been pronunciation guides within the questions, and you're definitely right about conveying the written information correctly in order to reward knowledge. I apologize for this oversight. To be frank, it didn't even occur to me to add them since I was in a terrible rush to get things done. However, I will do my best to implement pronunciation guides next time. And thanks again for volunteering to moderate at the tournament. Adam Fine wrote: "Now for the questions: for the most part, they felt fair enough. The science was inaccessible to me, but then again I suck at science, so I cannot be the judge. But I felt the lit, for which I am quite average, was quite accessible to most teams. The only thing I would like to have seen with the science was at least a smattering of questions on astronomy and earth science. As far as I could remember, there was zero astronomy, and for earth science, the only question I heard was on mica (though Rick Grimes told me of a couple of bonuses later in packets). I know these aren't major science subjects, but I feel they do deserve 1-2 combined questions per packet." There are 4/4 science questions in each packet I write/edit (same for history and literature). I always make sure that there is at least 1/1 physics, 1/1 chemistry, and 1/1 biology (at least that's my intent; I'm sure I've erred before). The remainder falls under "miscellaneous," which includes either one of the aforementioned subcategories or things like astronomy, earth science, CS, science biography, etc. The largest portion of submitted miscellaneous science questions went to an additional "Big Three" science. The second largest portion went to CS, and the third largest was probably biography. (Note that these are the submitted proportions, not the actually used proportions.) As David Hamilton pointed out earlier, people just didn't feel like writing astronomy and geology this year. That, coupled with my predilection towards the Big Three, is probably what contributed to the lack of astronomy/geology. I don't agree with the idea that there should be 1-2 of astronomy/geology per packet. I prefer the hard sciences (insert geology joke here). But now we're just discussing preferences and that never really gets anywhere. I should also note that the ACF guidelines for question-writing specifically require the submission of an earth science and an astronomy-type question. Most teams did not follow this submission criterion, along with many others. To briefly address Adam's "statistical anomaly" issue, I'll say that he's right. No offense intended, but a team with such numbers should not be finishing at around .500. This is entirely a function of the packets I received from the participants, which I thought were too hard. I have a lot more to say about this, so I'll address it in another post. Seth Kendall wrote: "2) the option to prompt could have been used more often; I can think of at least three incidents in which a prompt might have made things more comfortable." Seth, I would appreciate it if you could let me know what those specific incidences were so I can fix it for next time around. Thanks again for the critiques, which are always welcome. R. Bhan Editor ACF Nationals 2002
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