ezubaric wrote:Packets are now available here:
http://www.princeton.edu/~cbowl/parfait2007/packets.zip
They'll also be going up on the archive soon, hopefully.
Great. I'll save these files next to my video of Chris Ray playing CBI at Arizona state.
ezubaric wrote:Obviously, it's fine to talk about the questions specifically now. Many people have detailed comments they want to share, and now is the time.
I've kind of lost the will to do this; so many of your tossups could have been improved by doing a simple Google scholar search or looking through old packet sets for interesting leadins (Transposons come to mind).
ezubaric wrote:Part of the problem I think was that I tried to keep clue order and answer selection intact in the questions that I edited, and both of those things contributed to things that were noted as problems (what people have termed false lit and early giveaways, e.g. Calvino).
Why would you do this? That's not editing, that's just glancing!
ezubaric wrote:The bonus difficulties were not as regular as they should have been (particularly when it came to science), and this got by me. It shouldn't have; I guess it didn't come out during playtesting because we have a science heavy team, and none of the mirrors complained when we sent out the questions a week in advance for them to playtest.
See AlsoFinal Exam Schedule 2023-2024
The problem with your science wasn't that it was irregular; the problem was that it absolutely sucked. I can't think of a single question in my field in which the giveaway didn't come too early or that the leadin was completely uninteresting or that the answer choice was simply transparent and poor.
ezubaric wrote:There was too much bible, but we started off with a bible-heavy distribution that only got worse when our mirror questions came in. When we saw what was happening, I tried to add non-bible questions, but that's an area I'm particularly weak in, and I obviously didn't do enough.
At least it gave me the opportunity to make a sign with "You White People and Your Bible on it". Quite entertaining, at least for me. Why are you starting out with a bible-heavy distribution anyway, when you know that it wouldn't be well-received? It seems like a silly thing to do.
ezubaric wrote:I'm sorry that people didn't enjoy the questions, but Guy and I did try to put on a good tournament. We did put in a lot of work, and I think the questions improved during the course of the editing process. At the time, I thought we were able to handle producing more packets to make up for the loss of our third mirror, but it obviously hurt our quality and diversity of questions to an unforeseen extent.
Nice to hear that the questions improved, at least. And it sucks that a mirror bailed out on you; still, in the time between your deciding to run this tournament and it actually taking place, there's no reason you could have cranked out the packets yourself instead of hitting up mirrors for them.
ezubaric wrote:This brings me to Jerry's absurd claim that we are being lazy and cashing in on Chris Frankel's (admittedly strong) reputation. First, although the final product might not have lived up to Jerry's exacting standards, we were not lazy. Guy, Irene, and the rest of the team put in many hours to write these questions when we could have just decided to throw an IS tournament.
What good would throwing an IS set tournament do you? No respectable team would show up! That doesn't even matter; this is a horribly fallacious argument anyway. You're justifying the poor quality of your writing by saying that you could have been even lazier and bought the questions instead of assembling them a la Frankenstein from well-known chesnuts and horrible leadins.
Are we supposed to be grateful that instead of 50% of the questions being horribly transparent and falling off of the Gunn-Peterson difficulty cliff like so many quasar spectra lemmings, that 90% of them didn't? I spent upwards of 7 hours getting to this tournament, our club paid a fair fee to play in it, only to show up at get hosed repeatedly. Was this supposed to be an exercise in learned helplessness or something? If so, I salute you, Jordan Boyd-Graber, as the avatar of Martin Seligman that the quizbowl community so desperately needs. Give me a break.
And while you insist that you and guy weren't lazy in writing this tournament, I say that's impossible by any objective standard. This isn't some tournament assembled by a group of young players who don't know what clues are reused all the time. You and Irene have been around quizbowl for some untold number of years - Matt Weiner even claims that you played against him at high school nationals. And yet you write horribly skewed packets full of chestnuts for leadins and blatant transparency, and claim that you weren't lazy about it? I find that decidedly hard to believe.
Also, stop framing this as Jerry expecting too much out of a tournament; demonizing him isn't going to make people enjoy your set any more. While I'm usually the first to criticize him (to his face, not on here) for getting angry and being down on questions, in this case I feel that his indignation was completely justified. Even our freshman teammate, whose previous college experience had come solely from ACF Fall and EFT2, started to complain about the questions. This isn't ICT, this isn't Moon Pie, this isn't f*cking VETO; this was supposed to be a decently written set by an experienced team, and everyone (not just Jerry) was disappointed.
ezubaric wrote:This is also an insult to the efforts of Dan Benediktson who put in nearly as many hours as Chris did on Chris's Kickboxer (Chris's last tournament, over three years ago) and my first two PARFAITs. Dan's hand was clearly missed here.
Not knowing who this fellow is, I'll take your word for it that he would have been able to single-handedly pull PARFAIT out of the muck. But from what I understand, you and Irene have been around since god knows when, and have had the pleasure of probably going to several well-written tournaments in that time. Appealing to the absence of some other quizbowl dinosaur seems hardly justified.
