Naqt Questions

[Guilleuma Deeken]

Duringmost summers, NAQT seeks question writers in all subject areas and all difficulty levels, though we are particularly in need of additional writers of middle school and high school questions. Previous experience writing questions in our style is helpful, but not necessary for acceptance.

Applications from current college players are welcome; NAQT tracks the author of each submission to make sure writers do not hear their own questions at tournaments. College players may write for high school and middle school packet sets, and they may also write college-level questions that will be stockpiled for later use. Applicants from people who are not current college players are also welcome, as long as they meet the following criteria.

These are more difficult middle school questions used at the Middle School National Championship Tournament held each spring. The sample packet is from the preliminary rounds; the playoff rounds use harder questions (with longer tossups), similar to those in the Invitational Series sets.

These are questions written for television shows. Each packet has 40 short tossups, 40 one-part bonuses, and four lightning rounds. Licensing these questions for broadcast requires special arrangements with NAQT to ensure that no broadcasts occur before all users of the questions have finished taping. Contact t...@naqt.com for details.

These are difficult high school questions that are used at the High School National Championship Tournament that is annually held around Memorial Day weekend. These questions would also be appropriate for most college varsity teams, but are probably too difficult for most high school teams.

These are relatively difficult questions used in Division I at the Sectional Championship Tournaments held each February to determine the teams that will go on to compete at the Intercollegiate Championship Tournament. Community College SCTs use regular Invitational Series questions.

If you have any questions about NAQT or its questions, please contact us at na...@naqt.com. We would be happy to advise you on which questions would be most appropriate as for your team practices or for your tournament.

The following policies apply to tournaments run on NAQT questions that involve teams or players from more than one school. Except as noted, they apply to all such tournaments, regardless of their level or nature, unless NAQT has explicitly waived or modified them for a specific tournament or host. Some tournaments (such as collegiate Sectional Championship Tournaments and Community College Sectional Championship Tournaments) are subject to additional policies not covered on this page.

Hosts must give NAQT accurate information about the intended audience of the event, the date(s), and any other information necessary to ensure that suitable questions can be assigned and delivered to the event. This includes prompt notification of any changes. Due to internal question-production deadlines and other factors, NAQT cannot always accommodate date changes.

Hosts must remind attendees not to share question content on the Internet in any form, no matter how private they think the communication may be. This includes the fact that matches may not be recorded or streamed.

Within two weeks of the end of the event, hosts must tell NAQT what schools attended and how many teams attended. If any pseudonyms were used, identification of the actual schools is still required. NAQT strongly prefers to get more complete results (including team contact information) and incentivizes doing so by charging an extra fee for failing to provide this information, but identifying the schools and number of teams in attendance is an absolute requirement for question security and proper billing. Events in championship series organized by statewide athletic or activities associations are exempt from this rule because NAQT will work with the associations to obtain the necessary information; events that are not for schools (such as summer opens) are exempt from the school portion of this rule because it would not make sense for such events.

Hosts need to recruit their own staff (moderators, scorekeepers, statisticians, etc.). Hosts are permitted to require that teams provide staff, or incentivize them to do so; however, hosts may not require or incentivize any specific person to work at a tournament, except that coaches may require their own players to do so.

Please note that the same set of questions is often used at multiple events, so you should make certain that you do not plan to attend more than one tournament using each set. The set being used by a tournament is listed with the other tournament information. You should also consult the page of tournaments listed according to what questions they used. Some sets with different names share questions; please contact na...@naqt.com for details.

While this article will feature several legitimate issues with NAQT from both past and present, it will attempt to also include the less evidence-based criticisms that have been leveled against it over the years - for a detailed discussion of just the former, see criticisms of NAQT.

NAQT has long distinguished itself from its competitors in quiz bowl with a 24 tossup/24 bonus format which incorporates a large amount of pop culture, misc, and a unique flavor that can verge into the extreme. In comparison to ACF, its questions are shorter and have powermarks, and its rounds at various levels of competition were timed. These major differences, as well as minor points like per-set rather than per-packet distributions and a propensity for mixed academic questions, have long been sticking points for those who prefer a different sort of quizbowl experience.

Some of these differences are due to NAQT positioning itself as the "good quizbowl" replacement for College Bowl, retaining some of the quirks that made CB so popular in an effort to absorb more of the audience[dubious - discuss]. Founded to represent a vision of the game which emphasized tests of knowledge over any gimmicks, ACF adopted a distribution which featured 20 tossups and 20 bonuses with no pop culture and no powermarks. The two competitions have maintained these differences since their founding, and though not everyone likes it ACF has become the standard for much of modern quizbowl: housewrites almost exclusively use the modified ACF format rather than any approximation of NAQT's, few feature pop culture, and most difficulty scales are pinned to the flagship ACF events of Fall, Regionals, and Nationals.

Despite this, NAQT is a much larger organization. The popularity of its Invitational Series and its collaborations with regional organizations like VHSL mean that majority of all quizbowl players play primarily NAQT questions, with a significant fraction not playing questions from any other provider (or even being aware of any alternatives). As another data point, as of 2021 the top ten largest tournaments ever have all been High School National Championship Tournaments run by NAQT; ACF does not run any high school events. The size of NAQT means that it is important whether or not they are doing a good job. An incremental improvement in the quality of NAQT questions would affect literally thousands of people, so it is in everyone's benefit that they are kept accountable.

Historically, there has been anti-NAQT sentiment. Some of it was fueled by criticisms of the organization that have been largely taken to heart and used to improve the organization and the tournaments that it runs. Some of it is has been fueled by simple dislike: of NAQT, of its tournaments, of the institutions it represents. Some of it has legitimacy and addresses community concerns that have yet to be resolved. This article is a summary of some of the causes and reasons for this mainstay of quizbowl discourse.

"Good quizbowl" is a catch-all term coined during the transition away from College Bowl and related formats which encompasses a number of axioms which are held to be essential to a fair and meaningful game. Core among these are that questions should abhor trivia, fairly reward knowledge, and incorporate pyramidality.

In NAQT's early history, there was considerable debate over whether NAQT had distanced itself enough from college quizbowl's predecessors. During this time period, the invested portion of the community, including those who were dictating the direction of the game, was heavily invested in a vision of the game exemplified by ACF. In this same era NAQT questions and tournaments were frequently below the quality of the equivalent ACF products, with various ICTs of the early 2000's marred by controversies. Since then, however, NAQT's hiring of members of the community like Jeff Hoppes and continued efforts for improvement mean that it is now widely considered to be of commensurate quality with its competitors.

In the modern era, almost every NAQT question is written to meet the standards of "good quizbowl". There exist exceptions in the form of television-format questions, which are often written as speedchecks which are not strictly pyramidal. In these situations NAQT has been limited by existing formats which prevent the use of pyramidal questions, but their work with these contracts continues to satisfy other standards of quality (e.g. an emphasis on straight-forward academic questions instead of hoses, swerves, or other banal content) and has the added benefit of forcing out other providers, which do not have similar standards.

Setting aside the TV sets presented as an exception in the previous section, every NAQT question at every difficulty level is written to be pyramidal. This is a key observation to make: it is not possible for every question written to be perfectly pyramidal (i.e. to have every clue in strictly descending difficulty order) but having knowledge of an writer's good intentions is typically sufficient to forgive mistakes in this regard, provided they are infrequent enough to indicate good faith attempts. At this point in time, there is no reason to suspect that NAQT is systematically failing to maintain pyramidality in its questions.

3a8082e126