Quiz Bowl: Academics Competing Across The Country
Whether you are a student looking for an exciting extra-curricular activity or you have a friend that is a member of this subculture, this article will explain the idea behind quizbowl, the people involved in quizbowl and the rules of the game.
- Harvard University
- University of Minnesota
- University of Chicago
- Brown University
- University of Maryland – College Park
At the high school level, two companies produce questions used at regular season tournaments. Each of these companies as well as a third writes and manages an annual tournament to decide the national champion.
- NAQT – By far the largest question-writing company, NAQT consists mostly of former players at the college level. They write questions that are meant to be accessible to the widest variety of students and therefore have the largest national tournament, bringing in more than 100 teams to Chicago each Spring.
- HSAPQ – The youngest of the major companies, HSAPQ is an organization mostly made up of current college students who believe NAQT’s products often suffer from the age of writers. While NAQT has since taken steps to prevent this, HSAPQ remains the company most receptive to the active quizbowl community. HSAPQ offers a different sort of national tournament in that teams consist of a state’s “all-star” team and can therefore have players from different schools.
- PACE – PACE does not write regular season tournaments, but it manages the more exclusive national tournament. PACE NSC (the name of that tournament) offers more challenging questions than NAQT’s HSNCT (the other nationals) and tends to focus more on academics by removing popular culture questions.
At the college level, NAQT continues to have wide support and offers one of two national tournaments:
- NAQT – College-level NAQT tournaments have separate divisions based on Undergraduate status and nationals experience. NAQT also runs qualifying tournaments earlier in the school year called Sectionals.
- ACF – ACF is an organization of current and recent college and graduate students that offers an alternative to NAQT with slightly longer questions and greater transparency. ACF’s tournaments include a Fall event followed by ACF Winter and Regionals before the Nationals competition, all of which are packet-submission, meaning teams each write a round of questions that will be their bye rounds at the tournament. Editorship falls to ACF members who are not playing and is considered a great honor in the community.
The Rules
Each of the above companies, as well as the many schools that write questions for local tournaments, tend to have slight variations in rules. HSAPQ even writes for some states’ high school leagues and therefore uses multiple formats. I will try to explain the most common formats.
NAQT often uses timing for each half of the round, with different timings for each level of play. The other formats are generally untimed. In all formats, there are varying rules as to how long a team has to answer bonuses, how long after hitting a buzzer a player has to answer the tossup and how long after the tossup has been read before moving on to the next tossup.
Tossups are often ten points when answered correctly. When a tossup is answered incorrectly, the answering team is often penalized with a loss of five points; PACE, for example, does not have a penalty for incorrect answers. In all the common formats, each team may answer a tossup only once, so an incorrect answer leaves the rest of the question for the opposing team. If a tossup is answered sufficiently early, some formats allow for a “power.” In NAQT tournaments, a power gives fifteen points instead of the usual ten, while PACE awards twenty points for early answers. Bonuses usually add up to thirty points, with each of the usual three parts worth ten.
Sites to Visit
The following site has the best information on quizbowl available online: HSQB.
These sites contain archives of quizbowl questions useful for practice:
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