Could you explain NAQT's involvement with the organization and operation of high school tournaments in Minnesota?
The technical answer to this is that NAQT proper is no more involved with the organization of high school events in Minnesota than it is anywhere else; NAQT always looks for teams that might be interested in hosting their first event and provides whatever logistical support it can to all hosts, but it doesn't do so to a greater quantitative or qualitative degree in Minnesota.
Obviously, though, that's not the whole story. I live in Bloomington (a southern suburb of the Twin Cities) and I spend a lot of time into "growing the circuit" through two separate organizations, the Minnesota Quiz Bowl Alliance (MQBA) and the Minnesota High School Quiz Bowl (MNHSQB) league. MQBA and MNHSQB have separate budgets and resources from those of NAQT (and from each other; I have three piles of scoresheets in my house, one for each organization).
That's not particularly strange; other NAQT members (and editors and writers) are very active in their local communities; Dwight has a hand in most, if not all, NAQT events in western Pennsylvania and Eric Bell has influenced most, if not all, NAQT events in Oklahoma at some point in their histories.
As a "full-time quiz bowl person," I have more time for this sort of activity than others, but the things that I work on in Minnesota are qualitatively the same as those that other members do in other areas. If people are interested in specifics, I run tournaments, maintain a website for local quiz bowl, help tournaments draw up schedules, maintain a mailing list for local teams, loan out buzzer systems, advise players on improving, connect college readers with high school events, and often moderate at events myself.
Are efforts still being conducted to grow the circuit in North and South Dakota?
Yes, but not only in those states; NAQT is making an effort to grow the circuit in a lot of places (including, for example, Colorado and Montana which we hope will have their first qualifying events this year). As alluded to above, this involves identifying likely sites and helping them host and promote their events.
I, personally (that is, through MQBA and its sister organization SDQBA), am continuing to work on South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa, and Wisconsin (the states which I can reach with an easy drive). This is more "in the trenches" work of actually going someplace and running a tournament with (or for) them.
What results have been seen in these states?
Probably the most significant result is that South Dakota now has its first NAQT-style tournament that is locally run without the physical presence of an NAQT member: the Siouxper Bowl at the University of Sioux Falls. Hopefully that will be the first of many. South Dakota also sent two schools (well, one school and one home-school association) to the HSNCT last year, which indicates a growth in interest in competing at a national level outside that of the Greater Sioux Falls Home School Association.
Overall, it's a slow process, but I think NAQT/circuit-style quiz bowl is taking hold as a legitimate, enduring activity. Hopefully we'll be able to get a similar tournament going in North Dakota as well.
It would be helped, of course, with more locals in states without active quiz bowl circuits; if you're a quiz bowl veteran reading this who has some time to devote to organizing high school (or college or community college) quiz bowl where you live, please get in touch with NAQT to see how we could work together to bring quiz bowl to more people.
Does NAQT plan on extending these elsewhere?
People are already working on growing the circuit in new states; NAQT would love to see such efforts take place in as many places as possible and is more than happy to provide logistical help and advice where it can (not to mention our standing offer of free questions for states that didn't have qualifying events last year).
At a high level, though, it's not NAQT itself making these efforts, but former players or individual members (acting as individuals and not being paid by NAQT for those efforts) that are conducting this type of outreach.
Do you feel this presents a possible conflict of interest when Minnesota/North Dakota/South Dakota teams compete at the HSNCT?
This seems like an curiously specific question . . . why would a team from Minnesota present a different ethical dilemma than one from Michigan (where NAQT also has a lot of members) or a hypothetical school that, say, spends $1,000/year on materials from NAQT?
In general, yes, I think there is a conflict of interest in all areas of quiz bowl where people make decisions concerning teams that they know well, that they like, or with whom they have independent financial dealings. This isn't unique to NAQT (or quiz bowl, for that matter); the more important question is, "Does NAQT have adequate safeguards in place to ensure that one particular member's potential biases don't result in unfair decisions being made?" The answer to that, I think, is "yes." We have an extensive editing process to weed out (unfairly) regionally biased questions, we have a committee to look at wildcard applications, we try to make qualification processes as objective and numbers-based as possible, we have protest committees at our tournaments from which members recuse themselves if they have connections to a team that's involved, and so forth.
NAQT holds fairness as one of its ideals and I think that we have done a good job in achieving that. If people reading this have their doubts, I welcome to you contact me personally (or NAQT as a corporation) with your questions so we can have a shot at answering them. We value our reputation very highly and would hate to think that people perceived systematic bias in our actions.
What relationship does NAQT hold with the other national high school tournaments, PAC, Questions Unlimited and PACE?
NAQT does not have a formal business relationship with Panasonic, Questions Unlimited, or PACE. Some NAQT writers and editors do similar work for PACE, but they aren't involved in an administrative or managerial capacity with NAQT. NAQT communicates with some of the named organizations, mostly for the purpose of avoiding scheduling conflicts.
Does NAQT use a balanced distribution per packet or is it just per tournament?
I would say "both." NAQT regular invitational series, for example, have 118 categories with specific quotas that need to be filled. Those categories are arranged hierarchically (e.g., "Literature, Mythology, Norse Mythology") and an attempt is made to balance them across packets at every level of the tree.
For instance, here are the literature questions from IS #68 (packet number, tossups/bonuses):
1: 5/4
2: 4/5
3: 5/4
4: 4/5
5: 5/4
6: 4/5
7: 5/4
8: 4/5
9: 5/4
10: 4/5
11: 5/4
12: 4/5
13: 5/4
14: 4/5
15: 4/5
So every round has exactly nine literature tossups and bonuses and the entire set has exactly one more bonus than tossup.
If it's just per tournament, why?
Quick answer, "It's not just per-tournament."
To answer this more deeply, I'm going to pose this alternate question: "Quiz bowl has a tradition of specifying distributions at a packet level, e.g., literature should be 5/5 per packet. Why doesn't NAQT do this?" I suspect that this is the real question that people are asking; if not, feel free to send me a follow up.
The reason NAQT doesn't do this is, without trying to be glib, because we can. Because we assemble all of the packets ourselves, we can specify a distribution with finer granularity. Packet-based systems usually include something like "Religion, mythology, and philosophy, 1/1" but the editors have no way of knowing if they are going to get 80% myth, 10% religion, and 10% philosophy or something else. They may also get philosophy questions that are 90% tossups and 10% bonuses. NAQT can ask for distributions on a "sub-packet" basis and distribute those as evenly as possible across the entire packet set (and among tossups and bonuses). In our eyes, this is a benefit. Yes, it means that philosophy isn't N/N for a single packet, but it's (for example) 6/6 for the entire tournament with some packets having a tossup, some having a bonus, and some having neither (but those packets would have something a sibling category in the tree, so it was "as even as possible.").
It also lets us include breakdowns of larger areas, like biology, that wouldn't subdivide evenly across packets and categories like "Foreign Language" that don't deserve 1/1 per packet. Under a packet-based system, if a category doesn't get 1/1, it gets 0/0.
One could hold the preference that it is proper to have exactly the same number of, e.g., literature, tossups and bonuses in each packet, but NAQT doesn't consider that to be an aesthetic benefit or necessarily more fair.
Are there any plans to specify the distribution NAQT uses?
If you mean more specifically than what can be deduced from NAQT's surveys, no, not at present.
Are there any plans to change the question length on either the high school or college level?
No, not at present. Broadly speaking, we feel that NAQT's questions are long enough (more precisely, that they contain enough clues), to fairly distinguish between teams eligible for the tournaments at which they are used. We would rather see the extra time that would go into reading/listening to longer questions be devoted to hearing more questions and/or reading more rounds at a tournament.
A lot of people have brought this issue up, and it's certainly something that NAQT has discussed internally. We pride ourselves on running fair championships that attract and cater to the game's top teams. Having looked at the results of past tournaments, we don't see any evidence that provably (or even ostensibly) weaker teams "win too many games" or have otherwise curious statistics that suggest NAQT's questions "aren't pyramidal enough" to distinguish teams at the upper end of the spectrum. Probably the most effective argument that an advocate of longer questions could make (to us) would be a statistical analysis that independently quantified team strength and relative winning percentage. If there are "too many upsets," NAQT would certainly (1) consider that a problem, and (2) look at increasing question length as one way to correct that problem.
In the same vein as the last question, are there any plans to release the formula used to calculate S-Values for ICT bids?
No. NAQT would like to release the formula since we think doing so would be part of the transparent qualification process that we value, but we are concerned that making it public would allow teams to "game the system," rendering it less fair.
We would be delighted to replace the S-value system with one that could be made public; anybody reading this who has an idea for how teams can be fairly compared across Sectionals (and, occasionally, across packet sets) is encouraged to send it to us along with an explanation of why it's more fair or can't be gamed; we'd love to have such a system and would have no qualms about making it and all of our calculations public.
Is NAQT considering branching out in its season sets to include "IS-College" sets to add to the number of NAQT collegiate tournaments per year, outside of tournaments ran on the high school IS sets?
Yes, we've considered this, but there are no plans to introduce such sets in the near future. There are a couple of reasons for this:
The most important one is that NAQT already struggles to meet its current production obligations; adding more sets (particularly larger, harder sets that require more person-hours per question) would be difficult to do, whatever the justification. If we had more writers (or editors), such sets would become much more likely.
The second reason is that NAQT thinks that the current circuit does a good job producing college-level sets; we don't see a gaping hole in the market that would either be tremendously profitable or tremendously useful to the circuit. Teams that are interested in playing questions of traditional circuit difficulty already have opportunities to do so and, really, should be doing at least some of that to improve themselves as writers and players.
The college teams that don't already attend a ton of tournaments are, broadly speaking, those for whom standard collegiate invitational questions might even be too hard. Our goals of getting new teams involved with quiz bowl are largely served by having IS sets available for them to play on; once they outgrow those, we're happy to tell them to start writing their own packets for circuit events.
The third reason is a little hard to distinguish from the previous one, but is basically that NAQT isn't certain that such events would be well attended. Our Intercollegiate Fall Tournament (ended in 2001) was essentially what you are asking for, and it simply didn't attract enough teams to be profitable without charging a very hefty fee.
What will happen as a result of the surveys held at HSNCT regarding the use of pop culture questions?
NAQT's writers are, for the most part, many years removed from high school. The purpose of the surveys is to make sure we are choosing topics for popular culture questions actually are still "popular."
Broadly speaking, we're planning to tally up the things mentioned and see which things high schoolers know about that we don't ask about (and vice versa). We'll put together a list of potential topics for writers and editors to take under consideration when writing questions.
Where do you see the college game in, say, 5 years and why? What is NAQT doing to take it there?
In terms of changes in the way the game is played, I don't foresee many changes; there don't seem to be grassroots movements to make massive changes to question formats or style, and none of the leading organizations (NAQT included) seems to have much reason to tinker with what appears to be a successful format.
The biggest change I think will occur is that there will be a larger stratification in the level of tournaments available so that teams have the options (somewhat simplistically) of choosing "easy," "medium," or "hard" tournaments that are not only differentiated by the quality of the opponents but also by the difficulty of the questions (both clues and answers).
This stratification will presumably eventually be mirrored in national championship structures and eventually codified, possibly even in a unified way across organizations (e.g., NAQT and ACF).
If I can interpret the first question as "where I would hope to see the college game," I'd also add that I hope that the college game will grow in terms of the total number of schools and people participating. NAQT hopes to make a significant effort over the next few years to get more college teams involved. We've devoted most of our past marketing efforts to the high school game in the past, so this represents a moderate policy shift for us.
Where do you see the high school game in, say, 5 years and why? What is NAQT doing to take it there?
The high school game has far less agreement on the proper format and distribution of questions than the college game, and there certainly are (largely regional) advocates of changes in question type, style, and subject matter. Probably those differences of opinion (and practice) will continue to exist; NAQT will continue to hold its ideal that quiz bowl should be a national (well, international) game with standard rules and gameplay. We had hoped to be able to convince state associations and coaches to share this goal, but we haven't been able to in the past decade, and I don't see any particular reason that we could hope to be more successful in the next five years.
We do predict continuing growth in high school participation, both in the number of teams, the amount of quiz bowl each team plays, the number of regions with significant quiz bowl presence, and the ability of the typical team.
NAQT hopes to continue to work with high schools, college, and former players to grow the circuit by creating teams at new schools and tournaments in new regions. We hope to be able to being providing more services to hosts to make hosting tournaments easier: automatic invitation systems, moderator databases, buzzer rental, etc.
FMWH would like to R. Robert Hentzel for his time and his willingness to answer these questions about NAQT.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Friday, December 28, 2007
Interviews with a Quiz Bowler - R. Robert Hentzel
NAQT is undoubtedly the most successful company with regards to the production of questions for use at over a hundred high school and collegiate tournaments each year.
In this interview, we speak with R. Robert Hentzel. is the current President, Chief Technical Editor and Chief Editor of NAQT. A Carper Award winner, he joined the organization after his graduation from Iowa State University in 1997.
This interview is the first of two parts. The second part will be released in the near future, as technically this interview is still in progress. As before with Lee Henry, questions are bolded, with the subject's responses listed afterwards.
HSNCT is growing on a large scale, with the 2007 event reaching 160 teams. If the event continues to grow - and with the growth of quiz bowl and NAQT's status as one of the top providers of questions, I can't believe it wouldn't - what will NAQT do to accommodate this upswing in demand on both the HSNCT attendance and the availability of questions sets? Do current ideas include using multiple sites, placing a cap on the field size, limiting the number of teams that can register from an event, or instituting a high school level equivalent of an S-value?
The short answer to that question is, "yes." The rapid growth of the HSNCT, while essentially the best possible problem for us to have, does bring some logistical/qualification issues with no easy answers. Everything you've suggested has been mooted internally along with a lot of other approaches.
For this year, I think, the issues won't be tremendously serious. No team that joined the waiting list last year was denied an invitation, and the fact that we're starting out with a 160-team field and the reserved-berth policy should make the qualification/registration process more efficient and sufficient for the task at hand. We're anticipating a 160-team tournament this year that we think will match up very well with the number of teams that qualify (and have the means to attend).
That said, we are expecting that the 2009 championship will have to do something differently or the number of teams that have qualified to come (and who want to) will significantly exceed the number of spots available; this would provide all manner of perverse incentives to game the qualification system, which is not what we want to see (and not what we want our hosts to deal with).
In terms of your specific suggestions:
Multiple sites: We have considered using multiple sites, but our general feeling is that a multiple-site tournament just isn't a "real championship," even if the winner from one date is available to travel to the second for a grand showdown. And if they aren't, one is left with no satisfying way to crown a single champion. That is clearly a subjective opinion, but I think we are unlikely to move to multiple sites (on different weekends). We might start using two sites in the same city. We might also create a second-tier "NIT" tournament that could be held in a different city on a different weekend.
Limiting the field: I think we'll definitely have a cap on the field size, but our goal is to make that cap more-or-less irrelevant by choosing qualification policies that ensure that the number of teams that want to come is approximately equal to the number of spots provided. We don't want teams to be in the situation of having proven themselves good enough (by our own criteria), but being unable to compete because "The field's full, sorry!" That is: limiting the field size will be done, to the best of our prognosticative ability, by qualification parameters rather than arbitrary caps.
Limiting qualification: I think it's very likely that qualification standards will get stricter as time goes on. I don't know exactly what form that will take, but it seems like the natural and fairest way to keep the supply and demand for HSNCT spots in step.
Instituting an S-value: By and large, NAQT would like to avoid an S-value at the high school level. We think that the sheer number of qualifying events together with the wildcard system should eliminate the need for such a system. It's different at the college level where there is exactly one sectional (of greatly varying opponent quality) for each team and it is imperative that we perform some sort of statistical analysis to determine which teams are (probably) the best. We believe the S-value computation (or something like it) is necessary in the collegiate sectional-nationals model, but its secrecy and complexity make it a necessary evil rather than something we'd like to see transplanted to the high school game. It's much cleaner to just say, "Go to tournaments; if you win enough games, you're in!"
We've also considered:
Lengthening the tournament: If we had matches on a third day we could handle more teams with the same number of rooms, moderators, and guaranteed games but it would increase the cost of the event for all parties. Some teams may enjoy the extra downtime, but others wouldn't. This is a scenario that gets some support among NAQT members and we'll be investigating teams' views on it in this year's surveys.
Reducing the number of guaranteed games: Dropping the number of guaranteed games would let us handle more teams with the same number of rooms, moderators, and days in the tournament. We're loathe to do this, however; we know that teams love quiz bowl and we think it would lessen the value and prestige of the event to cut back to giving each team (for example) eight games. This can't be ruled out, but I think we're very likely to try other solutions first before falling back on this one. We're proud that we've managed to keep ten guaranteed games for every team even as the HSNCT has quintupled in size.
What caused powers, negs and timed matches to be an integral part of the NAQT format? Will those continue to be used into the future for official NAQT matches?
"Negs" (5-point penalties for incorrect interrupts of tossup questions) had always been a part of collegiate quiz bowl in the experience of NAQT's founders and I don't think there was serious discussion about eliminating them. It was what players were used to and there didn't seem to be anything to gain by changing it.
Having said that, perhaps I should add that NAQT's founders were principally experienced with the collegiate game; not all of them had played in high school and, if they did, it was often in regions where quiz bowl was not highly organized. In any case, high school rules vary greatly from state to state and there wasn't a clear standard that could have been adopted even had NAQT wanted to. In contrast, the collegiate game (despite what fifteen years' of Internet flamewars might suggest) is quite unified in terms of format, style, and rules. NAQT's first question sets (1996-1997) were all collegiate ones; there was always the intention that we would supply high school sets as well, but that didn't happen until the second year (1997-1998) when it was decided that we would use identical rules for the college and high school games.
Having written that, I guess the short answer (from a high school perspective) is "The collegiate game had a unified, national format with which NAQT's founders were familiar. Negs were a part of that and thus became part of our high school format."
Powers, on the other hand, were not part of the collegiate format. They were added to differentiate NAQT from existing formats and to add excitement to matches. One of NAQT's founders was also an enthusiastic sabermetrician, so there may well have been an underlying fascination with statistics that drove its introduction as well.
NAQT chose to have timed matches for a number of reasons, the most general of which was that it fit our collective idea of "what quiz bowl should be." We want quiz bowl to be a fast-paced, exciting game and timing the matches contributed to that. In untimed matches, no matter how fast or slow one plays, one will hear the same number of questions; on the clock, however, the losing team has the option of playing more recklessly in the hopes of making a comeback.
I wasn't a founding member, but it was also my experience coaching/captaining the Iowa State squad that bringing clocks to practice induced an interest and concentration among players that just wasn't there without them. I have no good reason for why that should be, but it was immediately noticeable and almost electrifying to watch.
At the same time, timing matches (and its bedfellow, question-length caps) makes it possible to schedule more matches in the same amount of time and makes a tournament schedule more regular.
Timed matches are a contentious issue in the quiz bowl community, and I certainly don't want to suggest that they are nothing but beneficial. They are more stressful on a moderator, they often require two staffers per room (expensive), they can lead to "clock-killing negs," they require that tournaments find clocks, and inexperienced readers can sometimes get through so few questions (14?) that the validity of the match is questioned.
None of those points can be waved away; NAQT has certainly has internal discussions about whether to keep the clock (witness our questions about it on the two most recent ICT surveys). According to those surveys, a 2:1 majority of (collegiate) players prefer the clock and our collective membership opinion is that, with experienced moderators and scorekeepers, the timed game "experience" is superior to the untimed one. That said, we do allow even "Official" NAQT events to be played untimed (no such exception is made for other rule changes), so that suggests the degree to which we realize there are issues associated with timed matches that make them not the right choice in every circumstance.
I suppose I'll add here that NAQT recognizes that a wide variety of people play quiz bowl; it is NOT our corporate opinion that "untimed matches cannot be exciting" or anything like that; we're happy that there are opportunities for people to try different styles of quiz bowl and see which ones they like most (for whatever reasons are most important to them).
Are powers, negs, or timed matches likely to change in the near future? Probably not.
One topic that seems to come up often in quiz bowl circles is the usage of computational math questions. Proponents argue that mathematics is an important topic and computational abilities is a valid area to test, while opponents state that they don't test the same type of knowledge as other question categories and are not pyramidal. NAQT does use questions involving computation; are there plans to discontinue this practice? What is NAQT's reasoning for the usage (or, if planned, ending of the usage) of these questions?
There are no plans to discontinue this practice (though, with very few exceptions, NAQT only uses computation questions at the high school and community college level).
I'll add that, in our experience, the question of whether or not computation should be part of quiz bowl only "comes up often" on Internet forums that are dominated/seeded by collegiate players. Based on our feedback from most invitationals, there is no question whatsoever in the minds of most tournament hosts and league organizers that computation questions should be a part of (high school) quiz bowl and, in fact, would never consider buying from NAQT if they weren't present.
That's not universal, of course, but we receive as many complaints from coaches (and players!) that there isn't enough computation in our packets as we do that there is too much.
Broadly speaking, the principal justification for NAQT's use of computation questions is that our customers want (nay, demand!) them. Evidence for this is that we don't use them at the collegiate championship level where a slight majority (to judge by our post-ICT surveys) of top players prefer that they not appear in packets.
That said, NAQT doesn't feel that computation questions are incompatible with quiz bowl; we have no objection to writing them in the way we would if some host asked us for packets that were 20% hoses "to give the other teams a chance." By and large, we feel that any sort of knowledge that can be tested in the quiz bowl tossup/bonus format should be, to a degree determined by its answerability and popularity. For instance, if it were feasible to build matchstick bridges in 5 seconds, we'd almost certainly ask teams to build a matchstick bridge at some point. We'd love to test creative writing, musical performance, or other valuable activities, but they don't fit into the quiz bowl format.
Mathematical computation, however, does. In fact, I, personally, would argue that computation questions often involve a deeper form of knowledge than most quiz bowl questions since one must understand and apply principles rather than "simply" pairing facts together. The fact that it's a "different type" of knowledge doesn't bother us one bit; we want to test knowledge and the application of knowledge as far as is possible within the confines of the tossup/bonus structure.
The fact that they aren't "pyramidal" doesn't bother us; in fact, we'd say that that argument misses the fundamental aspect of tossup questions. The defining feature of a tossup should be that it rewards the player with the most knowledge and/or the greatest ability to reason using that knowledge; computation questions do that because those players will be able to understand, formulate, and solve computation problems more quickly. I don't think it can be disputed that this occurs in practice.
It's also true that the pyramidal questions fit this model: by putting hard clues first, they differentiate among those with deeper and shallower knowledge. This is the paradigm used by 95% of all quiz bowl tossups, and it's not surprising that it might be mistaken for the sine qua non of tossups, but, to NAQT, it's not.
That said, pyramidality is the best known model for almost all subject matter in quiz bowl tossups and NAQT clearly adopts it as the proper approach for almost all questions. The fact that a few areas of knowledge allow other types of questions that reward more knowledgeable players without using the pyramidal model, however, doesn't in-and-of-itself make those questions ineligible to be part of quiz bowl.
One criticism which is fairly common for NAQT's question is the number of pop culture questions. What is NAQT's reasoning for the inclusion of questions on pop culture topics, and are there plans for that portion of the distribution to be increased or decreased in the future?
NAQT's basic reason for including popular culture in our packets is that we don't view quiz bowl as a mirror held up to academia and/or the high school curriculum; quiz bowl is a reflection of society and culture as a whole and broadly tests what we think (and, hopefully, our players and coaches) think people should know about because it'll be useful.
The majority of this knowledge is academic material: history, literature, science, etc., but it's also our justification for current events (people should know what's going on in the world) and popular culture (people should know what is going on with mass media and fads). The same side of this coin, however, is NAQT's inclusion of social science and art history at the high school level, even if those aren't taught in many high schools.
The plans for increasing or decreasing the amount of popular culture are basically the same as our "plans" for increasing or decreasing any other category. We evaluate anecdotal feedback; once we identify relatively common and/or vehement points of view, we try to devise surveys to gather more precise data. If it looks like there's a strong consensus that a change should be made, we'll make it.
For instance, over the years we've drastically reduced the amount of current events in our (collegiate) packets and made smaller alterations in other areas as well.
Also, is there a reason that NAQT officials do not respond to or participate in discussions that take place online regarding quiz bowl? Are discussions on sites like www.hsquizbowl.org or the (nearly defunct) Yahoo! board followed and used for ideas?
I don't think it's fair to base this question on the notion that NAQT simply doesn't respond or participate in online discussions of quiz bowl. I know that I have spent hours writing up responses to people's views on our tournaments and will almost certainly be doing so again in the future.
It's true that NAQT's members don't post as frequently on the boards as many players or coaches do; I certainly won't deny that compared to the heavy users, there aren't that many "rhentzel" posts to be seen.
We do, however, follow the online forums very closely and it's not unusual for one member to e-mail everybody else with a link to hsquizbowl.org to make sure that nobody misses a particular conversation. In general, I think we are as aware as anybody in this business (as we should be!) of online forums and the conversations that go on there. Certainly ideas and comments that come up on the board are discussed within NAQT; as an explicit example, many of the responses on our post-ICT surveys are modeled after critical comments in an attempt to provide choices that correspond to exactly why people don't like this or that rather than lumping their response into "I just don't like them."
I don't want to dodge the obvious question of "Why don't NAQT members post more often?" There are multiple reasons for that, which I'll try to outline:
1. I am the official spokesperson for NAQT in public forums, but I routinely bite off more than I can chew in terms of administrative and production work, which makes it difficult to find large chunks of time to devote to posting (except in the aftermath of our "prestige" events (SCT, ICT, HSNCT).
2. Other members are not the official spokesperson for NAQT and may not have NAQT's "position paper" (so to speak) at hand.
3. Some NAQT members disagree with aspects of NAQT's policies and may not feel compelled to defend them in a public forum.
4. NAQT discourages its members from entering bellicose discussions on the grounds that it is unseemly for members to be involved in flame wars, particularly with people for whom they may need to judge matches
or resolve protests in the future. It's particularly unseemly for members to be publicly critical of business competitors.
5. NAQT's members are (generally, but not always) older and have seen discussions of the same issues (distribution, pop culture, timed matches, computation questions, etc.) over and over again; they may
feel that they have little new to contribute, having expressed their feelings many times before.
6. NAQT's members are busy; by virtue of their being in NAQT they are effectively working two jobs (except for me) and, more and more, they are also raising kids. That may sound like a weak excuse to high
schoolers and collegians (it probably would have to me at that age), but it takes time to be an active forum participant and many NAQT members don't have as much of it as they did when they were younger.
7. NAQT is routinely behind on its production work; if members have spare time, they should be writing and editing questions for overdue sets rather than posting on the Internet.
8. Addressing critical questions takes a lot of time; if somebody criticizes NAQT for having science questions that are too easy, for instance, it's an unsatisfactory response for us to say, "Well, we don't think so. So there." A proper response requires tabulating tossup and bonus answerability data across the board and making comparisons. That takes a lot of time, even if the entire resulting post comes out as, "At a 95% certainty level, there was no difference in the mean PPB on science bonuses as non-science bonuses."
9. NAQT considers responding to incoming personal e-mails, faxes, calls, and (rarely) letters to be higher priority than posting on Internet forms. The "customer-service" time that we have is preferentially devoted to those activities.
In this interview, we speak with R. Robert Hentzel. is the current President, Chief Technical Editor and Chief Editor of NAQT. A Carper Award winner, he joined the organization after his graduation from Iowa State University in 1997.
This interview is the first of two parts. The second part will be released in the near future, as technically this interview is still in progress. As before with Lee Henry, questions are bolded, with the subject's responses listed afterwards.
HSNCT is growing on a large scale, with the 2007 event reaching 160 teams. If the event continues to grow - and with the growth of quiz bowl and NAQT's status as one of the top providers of questions, I can't believe it wouldn't - what will NAQT do to accommodate this upswing in demand on both the HSNCT attendance and the availability of questions sets? Do current ideas include using multiple sites, placing a cap on the field size, limiting the number of teams that can register from an event, or instituting a high school level equivalent of an S-value?
The short answer to that question is, "yes." The rapid growth of the HSNCT, while essentially the best possible problem for us to have, does bring some logistical/qualification issues with no easy answers. Everything you've suggested has been mooted internally along with a lot of other approaches.
For this year, I think, the issues won't be tremendously serious. No team that joined the waiting list last year was denied an invitation, and the fact that we're starting out with a 160-team field and the reserved-berth policy should make the qualification/registration process more efficient and sufficient for the task at hand. We're anticipating a 160-team tournament this year that we think will match up very well with the number of teams that qualify (and have the means to attend).
That said, we are expecting that the 2009 championship will have to do something differently or the number of teams that have qualified to come (and who want to) will significantly exceed the number of spots available; this would provide all manner of perverse incentives to game the qualification system, which is not what we want to see (and not what we want our hosts to deal with).
In terms of your specific suggestions:
Multiple sites: We have considered using multiple sites, but our general feeling is that a multiple-site tournament just isn't a "real championship," even if the winner from one date is available to travel to the second for a grand showdown. And if they aren't, one is left with no satisfying way to crown a single champion. That is clearly a subjective opinion, but I think we are unlikely to move to multiple sites (on different weekends). We might start using two sites in the same city. We might also create a second-tier "NIT" tournament that could be held in a different city on a different weekend.
Limiting the field: I think we'll definitely have a cap on the field size, but our goal is to make that cap more-or-less irrelevant by choosing qualification policies that ensure that the number of teams that want to come is approximately equal to the number of spots provided. We don't want teams to be in the situation of having proven themselves good enough (by our own criteria), but being unable to compete because "The field's full, sorry!" That is: limiting the field size will be done, to the best of our prognosticative ability, by qualification parameters rather than arbitrary caps.
Limiting qualification: I think it's very likely that qualification standards will get stricter as time goes on. I don't know exactly what form that will take, but it seems like the natural and fairest way to keep the supply and demand for HSNCT spots in step.
Instituting an S-value: By and large, NAQT would like to avoid an S-value at the high school level. We think that the sheer number of qualifying events together with the wildcard system should eliminate the need for such a system. It's different at the college level where there is exactly one sectional (of greatly varying opponent quality) for each team and it is imperative that we perform some sort of statistical analysis to determine which teams are (probably) the best. We believe the S-value computation (or something like it) is necessary in the collegiate sectional-nationals model, but its secrecy and complexity make it a necessary evil rather than something we'd like to see transplanted to the high school game. It's much cleaner to just say, "Go to tournaments; if you win enough games, you're in!"
We've also considered:
Lengthening the tournament: If we had matches on a third day we could handle more teams with the same number of rooms, moderators, and guaranteed games but it would increase the cost of the event for all parties. Some teams may enjoy the extra downtime, but others wouldn't. This is a scenario that gets some support among NAQT members and we'll be investigating teams' views on it in this year's surveys.
Reducing the number of guaranteed games: Dropping the number of guaranteed games would let us handle more teams with the same number of rooms, moderators, and days in the tournament. We're loathe to do this, however; we know that teams love quiz bowl and we think it would lessen the value and prestige of the event to cut back to giving each team (for example) eight games. This can't be ruled out, but I think we're very likely to try other solutions first before falling back on this one. We're proud that we've managed to keep ten guaranteed games for every team even as the HSNCT has quintupled in size.
What caused powers, negs and timed matches to be an integral part of the NAQT format? Will those continue to be used into the future for official NAQT matches?
"Negs" (5-point penalties for incorrect interrupts of tossup questions) had always been a part of collegiate quiz bowl in the experience of NAQT's founders and I don't think there was serious discussion about eliminating them. It was what players were used to and there didn't seem to be anything to gain by changing it.
Having said that, perhaps I should add that NAQT's founders were principally experienced with the collegiate game; not all of them had played in high school and, if they did, it was often in regions where quiz bowl was not highly organized. In any case, high school rules vary greatly from state to state and there wasn't a clear standard that could have been adopted even had NAQT wanted to. In contrast, the collegiate game (despite what fifteen years' of Internet flamewars might suggest) is quite unified in terms of format, style, and rules. NAQT's first question sets (1996-1997) were all collegiate ones; there was always the intention that we would supply high school sets as well, but that didn't happen until the second year (1997-1998) when it was decided that we would use identical rules for the college and high school games.
Having written that, I guess the short answer (from a high school perspective) is "The collegiate game had a unified, national format with which NAQT's founders were familiar. Negs were a part of that and thus became part of our high school format."
Powers, on the other hand, were not part of the collegiate format. They were added to differentiate NAQT from existing formats and to add excitement to matches. One of NAQT's founders was also an enthusiastic sabermetrician, so there may well have been an underlying fascination with statistics that drove its introduction as well.
NAQT chose to have timed matches for a number of reasons, the most general of which was that it fit our collective idea of "what quiz bowl should be." We want quiz bowl to be a fast-paced, exciting game and timing the matches contributed to that. In untimed matches, no matter how fast or slow one plays, one will hear the same number of questions; on the clock, however, the losing team has the option of playing more recklessly in the hopes of making a comeback.
I wasn't a founding member, but it was also my experience coaching/captaining the Iowa State squad that bringing clocks to practice induced an interest and concentration among players that just wasn't there without them. I have no good reason for why that should be, but it was immediately noticeable and almost electrifying to watch.
At the same time, timing matches (and its bedfellow, question-length caps) makes it possible to schedule more matches in the same amount of time and makes a tournament schedule more regular.
Timed matches are a contentious issue in the quiz bowl community, and I certainly don't want to suggest that they are nothing but beneficial. They are more stressful on a moderator, they often require two staffers per room (expensive), they can lead to "clock-killing negs," they require that tournaments find clocks, and inexperienced readers can sometimes get through so few questions (14?) that the validity of the match is questioned.
None of those points can be waved away; NAQT has certainly has internal discussions about whether to keep the clock (witness our questions about it on the two most recent ICT surveys). According to those surveys, a 2:1 majority of (collegiate) players prefer the clock and our collective membership opinion is that, with experienced moderators and scorekeepers, the timed game "experience" is superior to the untimed one. That said, we do allow even "Official" NAQT events to be played untimed (no such exception is made for other rule changes), so that suggests the degree to which we realize there are issues associated with timed matches that make them not the right choice in every circumstance.
I suppose I'll add here that NAQT recognizes that a wide variety of people play quiz bowl; it is NOT our corporate opinion that "untimed matches cannot be exciting" or anything like that; we're happy that there are opportunities for people to try different styles of quiz bowl and see which ones they like most (for whatever reasons are most important to them).
Are powers, negs, or timed matches likely to change in the near future? Probably not.
One topic that seems to come up often in quiz bowl circles is the usage of computational math questions. Proponents argue that mathematics is an important topic and computational abilities is a valid area to test, while opponents state that they don't test the same type of knowledge as other question categories and are not pyramidal. NAQT does use questions involving computation; are there plans to discontinue this practice? What is NAQT's reasoning for the usage (or, if planned, ending of the usage) of these questions?
There are no plans to discontinue this practice (though, with very few exceptions, NAQT only uses computation questions at the high school and community college level).
I'll add that, in our experience, the question of whether or not computation should be part of quiz bowl only "comes up often" on Internet forums that are dominated/seeded by collegiate players. Based on our feedback from most invitationals, there is no question whatsoever in the minds of most tournament hosts and league organizers that computation questions should be a part of (high school) quiz bowl and, in fact, would never consider buying from NAQT if they weren't present.
That's not universal, of course, but we receive as many complaints from coaches (and players!) that there isn't enough computation in our packets as we do that there is too much.
Broadly speaking, the principal justification for NAQT's use of computation questions is that our customers want (nay, demand!) them. Evidence for this is that we don't use them at the collegiate championship level where a slight majority (to judge by our post-ICT surveys) of top players prefer that they not appear in packets.
That said, NAQT doesn't feel that computation questions are incompatible with quiz bowl; we have no objection to writing them in the way we would if some host asked us for packets that were 20% hoses "to give the other teams a chance." By and large, we feel that any sort of knowledge that can be tested in the quiz bowl tossup/bonus format should be, to a degree determined by its answerability and popularity. For instance, if it were feasible to build matchstick bridges in 5 seconds, we'd almost certainly ask teams to build a matchstick bridge at some point. We'd love to test creative writing, musical performance, or other valuable activities, but they don't fit into the quiz bowl format.
Mathematical computation, however, does. In fact, I, personally, would argue that computation questions often involve a deeper form of knowledge than most quiz bowl questions since one must understand and apply principles rather than "simply" pairing facts together. The fact that it's a "different type" of knowledge doesn't bother us one bit; we want to test knowledge and the application of knowledge as far as is possible within the confines of the tossup/bonus structure.
The fact that they aren't "pyramidal" doesn't bother us; in fact, we'd say that that argument misses the fundamental aspect of tossup questions. The defining feature of a tossup should be that it rewards the player with the most knowledge and/or the greatest ability to reason using that knowledge; computation questions do that because those players will be able to understand, formulate, and solve computation problems more quickly. I don't think it can be disputed that this occurs in practice.
It's also true that the pyramidal questions fit this model: by putting hard clues first, they differentiate among those with deeper and shallower knowledge. This is the paradigm used by 95% of all quiz bowl tossups, and it's not surprising that it might be mistaken for the sine qua non of tossups, but, to NAQT, it's not.
That said, pyramidality is the best known model for almost all subject matter in quiz bowl tossups and NAQT clearly adopts it as the proper approach for almost all questions. The fact that a few areas of knowledge allow other types of questions that reward more knowledgeable players without using the pyramidal model, however, doesn't in-and-of-itself make those questions ineligible to be part of quiz bowl.
One criticism which is fairly common for NAQT's question is the number of pop culture questions. What is NAQT's reasoning for the inclusion of questions on pop culture topics, and are there plans for that portion of the distribution to be increased or decreased in the future?
NAQT's basic reason for including popular culture in our packets is that we don't view quiz bowl as a mirror held up to academia and/or the high school curriculum; quiz bowl is a reflection of society and culture as a whole and broadly tests what we think (and, hopefully, our players and coaches) think people should know about because it'll be useful.
The majority of this knowledge is academic material: history, literature, science, etc., but it's also our justification for current events (people should know what's going on in the world) and popular culture (people should know what is going on with mass media and fads). The same side of this coin, however, is NAQT's inclusion of social science and art history at the high school level, even if those aren't taught in many high schools.
The plans for increasing or decreasing the amount of popular culture are basically the same as our "plans" for increasing or decreasing any other category. We evaluate anecdotal feedback; once we identify relatively common and/or vehement points of view, we try to devise surveys to gather more precise data. If it looks like there's a strong consensus that a change should be made, we'll make it.
For instance, over the years we've drastically reduced the amount of current events in our (collegiate) packets and made smaller alterations in other areas as well.
Also, is there a reason that NAQT officials do not respond to or participate in discussions that take place online regarding quiz bowl? Are discussions on sites like www.hsquizbowl.org or the (nearly defunct) Yahoo! board followed and used for ideas?
I don't think it's fair to base this question on the notion that NAQT simply doesn't respond or participate in online discussions of quiz bowl. I know that I have spent hours writing up responses to people's views on our tournaments and will almost certainly be doing so again in the future.
It's true that NAQT's members don't post as frequently on the boards as many players or coaches do; I certainly won't deny that compared to the heavy users, there aren't that many "rhentzel" posts to be seen.
We do, however, follow the online forums very closely and it's not unusual for one member to e-mail everybody else with a link to hsquizbowl.org to make sure that nobody misses a particular conversation. In general, I think we are as aware as anybody in this business (as we should be!) of online forums and the conversations that go on there. Certainly ideas and comments that come up on the board are discussed within NAQT; as an explicit example, many of the responses on our post-ICT surveys are modeled after critical comments in an attempt to provide choices that correspond to exactly why people don't like this or that rather than lumping their response into "I just don't like them."
I don't want to dodge the obvious question of "Why don't NAQT members post more often?" There are multiple reasons for that, which I'll try to outline:
1. I am the official spokesperson for NAQT in public forums, but I routinely bite off more than I can chew in terms of administrative and production work, which makes it difficult to find large chunks of time to devote to posting (except in the aftermath of our "prestige" events (SCT, ICT, HSNCT).
2. Other members are not the official spokesperson for NAQT and may not have NAQT's "position paper" (so to speak) at hand.
3. Some NAQT members disagree with aspects of NAQT's policies and may not feel compelled to defend them in a public forum.
4. NAQT discourages its members from entering bellicose discussions on the grounds that it is unseemly for members to be involved in flame wars, particularly with people for whom they may need to judge matches
or resolve protests in the future. It's particularly unseemly for members to be publicly critical of business competitors.
5. NAQT's members are (generally, but not always) older and have seen discussions of the same issues (distribution, pop culture, timed matches, computation questions, etc.) over and over again; they may
feel that they have little new to contribute, having expressed their feelings many times before.
6. NAQT's members are busy; by virtue of their being in NAQT they are effectively working two jobs (except for me) and, more and more, they are also raising kids. That may sound like a weak excuse to high
schoolers and collegians (it probably would have to me at that age), but it takes time to be an active forum participant and many NAQT members don't have as much of it as they did when they were younger.
7. NAQT is routinely behind on its production work; if members have spare time, they should be writing and editing questions for overdue sets rather than posting on the Internet.
8. Addressing critical questions takes a lot of time; if somebody criticizes NAQT for having science questions that are too easy, for instance, it's an unsatisfactory response for us to say, "Well, we don't think so. So there." A proper response requires tabulating tossup and bonus answerability data across the board and making comparisons. That takes a lot of time, even if the entire resulting post comes out as, "At a 95% certainty level, there was no difference in the mean PPB on science bonuses as non-science bonuses."
9. NAQT considers responding to incoming personal e-mails, faxes, calls, and (rarely) letters to be higher priority than posting on Internet forms. The "customer-service" time that we have is preferentially devoted to those activities.
Friday, October 19, 2007
Slight Delay
The next episode of the podcast will be going up on Monday due to my still familiarizing myself with my audio editing software in a way that completely erased the results section I recorded.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
High school tournament calendar
This calendar will serve as a list of upcoming high school quiz bowl events.
If you have a tournament you'd like added to this calendar, please e-mail me at fredmorlan at gmail dot com.
If you have a tournament you'd like added to this calendar, please e-mail me at fredmorlan at gmail dot com.
Trash Tournament Calendar
In the future, this post will be updated with information about upcoming trash tournaments.
October 21, 2007
The University of Tennessee-Chattanooga will be hosting their annual Big Lots tournament, TD Charlie Steinhice
November 10, 2007
TRASH Regionals will be held at various sites on this date. Where possible, I have included links to information about these sites.
Great Lakes TRASH Regional, University of Michigan, TD Craig Barker
Southeast Regional, University of Tennesee-Chattanooga, TD Charlie Steinhice
Southwest Regional, Plano High School (Plano, Texas), TD Chris Romero
Midwest Regional, University of Missouri at Rolla, TD Matt Chadbourne
Mid-Atlantic Regional, by Charter School at the University of Delaware, TD Charter Academic Bowl
Eastern Canada Regional, Brock University, TD Andy Saunders
November 11, 2007
Northeast Regional, Brandeis University, TD Evan Nagler
If you have a tournament that you would like to see added to this calendar, please e-mail me at fredmorlan at gmail dot com.
October 21, 2007
The University of Tennessee-Chattanooga will be hosting their annual Big Lots tournament, TD Charlie Steinhice
November 10, 2007
TRASH Regionals will be held at various sites on this date. Where possible, I have included links to information about these sites.
Great Lakes TRASH Regional, University of Michigan, TD Craig Barker
Southeast Regional, University of Tennesee-Chattanooga, TD Charlie Steinhice
Southwest Regional, Plano High School (Plano, Texas), TD Chris Romero
Midwest Regional, University of Missouri at Rolla, TD Matt Chadbourne
Mid-Atlantic Regional, by Charter School at the University of Delaware, TD Charter Academic Bowl
Eastern Canada Regional, Brock University, TD Andy Saunders
November 11, 2007
Northeast Regional, Brandeis University, TD Evan Nagler
If you have a tournament that you would like to see added to this calendar, please e-mail me at fredmorlan at gmail dot com.
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Next Episode Delayed
Due to other obligations, the next episode of the Fire Matt Weiner's Head podcast won't be posted until October 15th at the earliest.
Friday, October 5, 2007
FMWH Podcast - First Full Episode
The first full episode of the Fire Matt Weiner's Head Podcast can be downloaded here. On it, we discuss the future of quizbowl in addition to recent events.
I am still familiarizing myself with the editing software, so apologies for any cracks or pops.
I am still familiarizing myself with the editing software, so apologies for any cracks or pops.
Friday, September 28, 2007
New Feature
Apologies for the radio silence - I've been working on an interview with NAQT founder R. Robert Hentzel, but outside of that I've been busy with non-quiz bowl things. However, that's about to change.
Click here to listen to the introductory episode of the podcast. It should be pretty self explanatory as to what the goal of the podcast is and what you can look forward to in the future.
The first episode should be posted on Monday or Tuesday.
Edit: Additionally, here are a couple of links to the mentioned podcasts:
Dwight Kidder's Nine Minutes
Mike Bentley's Quiz Bowl Cast
Click here to listen to the introductory episode of the podcast. It should be pretty self explanatory as to what the goal of the podcast is and what you can look forward to in the future.
The first episode should be posted on Monday or Tuesday.
Edit: Additionally, here are a couple of links to the mentioned podcasts:
Dwight Kidder's Nine Minutes
Mike Bentley's Quiz Bowl Cast
Monday, July 2, 2007
Everybody Panic!
www.hsquizbowl.org has been down for about eight hours now. Which is pretty much the opposite of good.
If the status of the site should change and I know of it, I'll be sure to post it here as soon as possible.
If the status of the site should change and I know of it, I'll be sure to post it here as soon as possible.
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