This is me we're talking about...you _knew_ I'd have something related to College Bowl in here somewhere. ;)
I'm an alumni of the University of Chicago College Bowl team, having played on it for 4 years while in school; I have since tried to maintain my involvement with the Chicago program as well as the College Bowl world in general, helping as an official at tournaments, and even occasionally dusting off my buzzer to play in a masters' competition. There are various formats to College Bowl that compete year round, including "ACF", "NAQT" , and "CBI" . Some people on our team like "TRASH", a strictly pop-culture oriented version of the sport, but I prefer the hard-core academic stuff myself. Most of our season is spent going to invitationals that are held by other colleges, and those are usually run on variations of the "Big 3" formats. For those, we often have to write question packets, and for useful suggestions on how to do that, read on further below. Also, on my Links Page, I have some websites listed which are good references for writing questions.
You can check out Berkeley's Tournament Records Page to see results from old tournaments, and Tournament Central, which has a list of new upcoming tournaments. The Maize Pages are a directory of College Bowl programs across the country, while if you're looking for question packets to download for practice, the Stanford Packet Archive is the place to go.
Return to my main page or go back to the foyer.
A warning on what follows: these are recommendations not only of things I've picked up over the years, but also from many other Chicago players. Some of these guys are holdovers from a team that won both CBI and ACF National Championships in 1994, compiling some ridiculous record, like 168-1 in the process; some are from the team that united the Triple Crown of Academic Competition in 1999, again posting a similarly gaudy record. That doesn't make them the ultimate authority on college bowl, but in my opinion, it's an awfully good starting place. :)
First off, the faux pas:
Don't write list questions. This doesn't differentiate between someone whose just memorized a list, and someone who's actually studied the material. Questions should reflect somehow a deeper knowledge that will enable an expert in the field to produce an answer before a novice. Example: I'm a history major, so there's no way I should get an advanced Biochemistry question ahead of someone who's doing a Master's degree in Biochemical Engineering. :) For this same reason, you shouldn't directly quote phrases from your source books. One of the veterans cited an example of how he got a question starting like "His work is a prime example of blah art movement..." because that was taken directly from The Oxford Dictionary of Art, which the Chicago player had been studying. This guy was an econ major; he knows nothing about art. The reason he got the question was he recognized the sentence the question began with.
Generally discouraged as resources are The Book of Lists, The Book of Lists II,
Significa an Incomplete Education, etc. because they are unreliable factually. Almanacs are
also discouraged as sources, since sometimes they're also questionable factually, and have the extra disadvantage of encouraging the temptation of writing list questions. (eg, name the world's top 5 exporters of
tumbleweeds! :) )
GOOD RESOURCES:
What I'm partially trying to accomplish here is to create a list of actual books for reference, much like Dwight Kidder has set up an online list of web references (See my Links Page for the location of Dwight Kidder's site.) Many of the books listed here are availible in used book stores, and indeed if you are an astute enough searcher, you can find many other useful books not enumerated here, sitting on dusty shelves, or if you're in Hyde Park, in the free bin at Powell's bookstore, just waiting to be rescued.
Although I just said almanacs are generally discouraged, they can be a good way to learn some random facts to help you answer questions in a tournament, especially since other people do write out of them. The World Almanac is okay, but the best one for this purpose is the Universal Almanac. I got a Universal one for about $10, which isn't too bad, and it's got a LOT of stuff in it. There are about 750 pages of everything you could possibly imagine: Oscar winners, sporting records, info about countries, etc.
If you are a literature person, your most valuable resource by far is by William Rose Benet. It's called The Reader's Encyclopedia, or Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia, and it's got summaries of authors, books, literary characters, basically all the major references you would encounter in reading. (IMO, Benet's is just a nice reference book to have on its own merit, let alone for its usefulness with College Bowl; the copy I have cost about as much as a moderately priced textbook for one of my classes, but I guarentee that I've gotten a lot more use out of it, and will continue to use it in the future long after most of my textbooks have become greyed over with dust.). The best way to get good at literature, and to write good lit questions is of course to actually read the books themselves, but summaries from books like Benet's are the second best thing, since it's virtually impossible to read EVERY great book ever written. Benet's is widely regarded as the bible for all College Bowl Lit experts. Also good stuff for this is Masterplots, Cliff Notes, and even the summaries on the dust jackets and inside covers of the books themselves.
For the science person on your team, Isaac Asimov has written a book called Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology. This is the Benet of science, and it has life summaries of most of the major scientists from the ancient Greeks to the present day. The danger here is that what you learn from this is stuff about scientists, not actual scientific laws. If you're writing a packet, you want to make sure you have balance between "biography" questions (who discovered *blank*) and "technical" questions (what cell organelle is responsible for, Name the optical property at work when light does...) and you're not going to get that if you use Asimov as your only source. You'll probably want to look at some intro course textbooks or some scientific journals for balance. Also of some help, I've been told, is the Oxford Concise Encyclopedia of Science, although my understanding is that this has its limitations.
If you're into history, Langer's Encyclopedia of World History is a good reference, as is the unrelated Encyclopedia of American History. I'm a history major, so I generally have some rather specific literature from my classes that I look to for this topic, but I'd offer "A Brief History of Russia" by Nicholas Riasanovsky as a good source for that particular genre of history. I also like some of the tidbits I get from "The History Net" (see my links page) because they have a lot of non-standard anecdotes for lead-in material.
Other general good resources are The Oxford Dictionary of "Blank Subject" and the Cambridge Dictionary of "Blank Subject". They've apparently got these for a bunch of different fields, such as art, music, etc. Anything like that is probably going to be a good resource. Encyclopedias are also a good source for general backround, although it's preferable to dig a little deeper in a specific resource for good lead-in material.
For CBI purposes, and also NAQT, since they rely much more heavily on current events than ACF, you'll want to do things like read the newspaper and watch the news. Good magazines are Time, The Economist, People, etc. If you're looking for specialty areas, there's Sports Illustrated, Scientific American, Science, National Geographic, Popular Mechanics, etc. If there's a big event, like the NBA finals, you'll probably want to have half an eye open for lists of previous occurrences. I know my hometown newspaper has in the past, published a list of previous Finals winners and MVP's along with their reports on the Finals series. One year, Chicago had gone to a tournament hosted by Wisconsin where the question packet deadline was right after the Super Bowl, and there were an incredible amount of questions about the Super Bowl, ie who was the MVP, identify *blank* about this previous moment in Super Bowl history, etc, because that was ready source material when all the teams were writing their packets.
The main thing you want to remember when writing questions is to make sure everything you say is worthwhile. Don't put in fluff about one thing and then ask about something else unrelated. Also, don't make your questions ambiguous: a question starting "His Secretary of State..." shouldn't have something like "The White House" as an answer. Your first pronoun should indicate what the answer is supposed to be. "He started out as an actor, but Ronald Reagan later became president of what country?" is a poor question, because when you hear "he" you're thinking of a person, and would likely buzz in early with "Reagan" only to find out that that later appears in the question. A GOOD TOSSUP SHOULD ENABLE A PLAYER TO ANTICIPATE ITS ANSWER! Also, for college packets, you don't want to make questions too obscure or too regional. One of the most reviled questions to have ever come up was "What is the minimum age for receiving a moped license in South Carolina?" which is so regional that you probably wouldn't have a chance of answering that unless you actually came from South Carolina, and which is so meaninglessly obscure, it's doubtful that you'd get it even then, unless you happened to have just taken a test to get a moped liscence.
On a sidenote, I make the distinction there of a college packet, because I had a couple of Drivers' Ed. questions come up in my high school days, and those I considered perfectly okay, since that's something that's a part of most curriculums, and it's completely reasonable to ask a high schooler about their own state law
My best advice personally would be to write questions as you see something interesting pop up, and then later go back and try to assemble a packet. In my opinion it's easier to maintain a distribution of subject matter this way, because I know when I've been trying to write for tournaments in the past, I've had trouble going out and finding "a movie question" to fill out a distribution. However, with some of the questions I'd had written already, it was easy to pull them out and say, "oh, that can be used as a pop culture question". A good player keeps a personal war-chest of questions ready to help handle distribution requirements, especially under tight editing deadlines. For instance, back in 1996, one could easily expect that there would be a lot of stuff from the Atlanta Olympics that would make for good question material, and it's simpler to just write it in July and August when the event is current, and then pull them out later as you need sports questions, rather than trying to go back in a couple of months and sift through old magazines, saying "Geez, I need a sports question for this packet."
Advice for the novice: Just try to write questions. Don't worry about how good they are yet. As you write more questions, and you go to more tournaments (and hence hear more questions written by other people) you develop a better feel for how things should be worded, and what topics make for good questions. A lot of this is common sense: when you go to a tournament and get a neg-five on what you feel is a "hose" question, well then were was obviously a mistake about the way the question was written which you should then avoid when writing questions yourself. Show your questions to other people, and have them comment on them to you. At Chicago, and I know also at several other schools, people are encouraged to bring in questions to practice and to read them there. Seeing how your teammates react to them can help give you an indication of how clear and how easy the questions are. I know a few I wrote initially were real clunkers. Even now I have substantial room for improvement, but I'm noticing some subtle differences in my questions as compared to when I first started writing them, so hopefully I'm headed in the right direction. :) The important thing is to start writing questions, because that's going to make you a better player. I picked up 2-3 questions at the first tournament I went to after we started writing practice questions only because I'd written questions on them. That made me feel quite good! :)
Anyway, that's the advice I have to share with you for now. If you want to talk more about question writing, feel free to email me but hopefully this is enough to get you started in the right
direction. Good Luck!
This page's address is:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Agora/6880/cbowl.html
http://www.geocities.com/mattuofc/cbowl.html
Get your own Free Home Page