Hi all-- (warning, longer message) A teammate who has not yet seen the same information come up over and over in multiple tournaments wanted to know how to best judge difficulty for the purpose of writing gettable questions. That was about the time of the earlier "Hooey" Thread. Naturally, typing answers to questions ALONG WITH their giveaway clues into google was an appealing answer for me to give at the time. We even came up with a "difficlty scale" from that goes from 1 (ridiculously easy) to 10 (unimaginably difficult) calculated by subtracting the log-base-10 of the number of results displayed by google from 10, and since that time, we've been happily ranking packets we've heard in practice. For question types for which this seems to work, most tossup questions rank from 4 to 7, while bonuses sometimes contain parts ranking as high as 10. People who have played for a while can get many of the 8s and 9s simply because they keep popping up from tournament to tournament. People who have just started playing tend to just tune out when these come up. My point is-- for someone who has never played quizbowl before, yet wants to begin writing questions, this is a useful guide because it shows how important something is to the world (more webpages = more important), if not potentially to quizbowl. For many of us looking back on all the packets we've heard and seen, though, the harder questions according to google are just part of the standard quizbowl fare that may seem to have been around forever. --Wesley (wondering what to call the "scale.")
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