Week 138: Can't count, won't count
and why correctness guidelines matter
I apparently can’t count sometimes. This was a fact I found out during Saturday’s CMU tournament. My normal method for individual prizes at a high school tournament is to collect ten books from my collection of items, balance them by subject, bring them to a tournament in a grocery bag, strip off their price tags at lunch, and hand them out to the top scorers after the tournament. If I’m feeling festive, I throw an eleventh book in as a neg prize. This time, I got done with my lunch pizza, and began checking the books for price tags and found that there were only nine books. I was very dissatisfied with myself, but I went to plan B.
Whenever I go to these competitions, I always carry one book in reserve, for just such an emergency. It’s usually the book that I chose to keep for another tournament, something that I hadn’t started extracting information from, or something that I’m midway through reading. In this case, I had intended to go through this book for years. I picked it up in 2019 intending to go through it for questions, and at one point in the winter of 2019-20 I had sat down at my office and pulled clues from the first two chapters, but I had stopped to go to a practice and so it’s been in limbo for years. It went on the plane to Nevada this summer, but there was always something else going on.
The only reason I would be OK with letting this book go was if I could do the grind through it. It was a book on the history of the periodic table, from the discount rack at Barnes and Noble. I kept it around because it fit both as training material for a new team, and as fodder for the book. If I could look through it, most of the notes would go into flashcards or simple questions for training the new team, and not into questions for tournaments. (The first practice was postponed until next week, which is why you’re getting this story this week.)
Circumstances yielded to me. In the original plan for this tournament, there were to be 18 teams, and after five rounds of 6-team round robin in the morning, the teams would move to playoffs after lunch. The problem with that was that not only had three teams completely bowed out, but two schools dropped from two teams to one. This put the field at 13, which if you’re familiar with logistics is one of the bad 4k+1 numbers. Anything 4k+1 can’t be done easily in two pools, because if you split into two pools 2k and 2k+1, your second pool takes two rounds longer to complete than the first. 13 is also a 6k+1 number, so it also is inefficient with three pools. If you break for lunch when some of the pools are complete, it’s an extra hour lunch break for some pools and not for others. This is highly annoying for teams, and for staff, but for me it was actually perfect. Because my room was used by the smaller pool, I had no match for an hour after lunch ended. And so I scraped four notebook pages of notes out of the book as I speed-read it.
I haven’t done that particular trick in years, in fact, I think I haven’t done that sort of thing since before I got sick. I used to do it as a way of expensing my book purchases, unless I wrote enough questions to cover the purchase of the book, I wouldn’t add it to the stack, meaning sometimes I would race through the tournament lunch hour taking notes from a book about to leave my clutches. I hadn’t realized I needed that exercise. It’s the same reason I’ve done the World Quiz Championships; at my worst when sick, I had no stamina, no ability to focus on two items and put them together, and I couldn’t really apply my mind to tasks for more than a few minutes. You don’t always need those skills, but if I’m going to finish this book, I will need that a few times. If I’m forced by circumstance into exercising that, without time to prep, so much the better.
The one thing of unusual note among the other books given away was a book from my aunt’s collection which was showing a price tag of $4.50 from when it was purchased probably some time in the 1970s. This being an old cardboard book cover with a cardboard gum-backed price tag, I instinctively moved to pop the label off of it. I then surprised myself that the original price was on the cover itself, and that the price had actually gone up for the book when sold. Originally the book was $3.99, but the publisher had put a $4.50 label on it, likely because it was shipped overseas and then purchased.
(This reflects an actual event, but it also allows me to cover something I’ve noted for the book, and for something I have to train a team on in one of the first practices.)
During the tournament I also saw a team lose points on a question where they were asked to provide a sports franchise for an answer, and proceeded to give a name not only not corresponding to the sport but also knowingly not to the geographic location which the clues led them to. This was painful because while the instinct to guess was correct, they attacked the wrong part of the problem in giving a wild guess.
There are several examples in NAQT questions where the type of information is specified for a type of answer, in a way that you can make an educated guess with much better odds than blind guessing. In most cases, when a fictional character is the answer, either the first or last name is acceptable. So in this case you aim for plausibly generic first name, and you maximize the size of your wild guess. If presented with the case where the answer is a French king, go with Louis for your wild guess and you’ve covered 17 of the field. In the case outlined above, a sports franchise, the geographic portion of the name is always acceptable in NAQT, unless there’s more than one franchise in that sport that shares the location, and then it’s promptable. This is by design. You want to have the remote possibility in all questions of a lucky guess, simply to move the game along. I don’t find this controversial or unfair, as this doesn’t interfere with a more educated guess being offered ahead of it, and it’s still usable as a confirming clue for an educated guess.
For television, what you need to remember about giving your answer is that you should try to provide only the information necessary to produce a uniquely identifying answer. That reduces your risk of giving a mostly correct answer, and executing a brain fart; a mostly correct answer scores exactly the same as a wrong answer. This is true whether you are talking about television or circuit competition. The basic rules of television competition answer correctness should be in their general rules, and provided by the station when asked; those have precedence over whatever is said here. They rules of correctness for television will be very brief because they’re necessary as standards, and to guide a judge to an immediate decision. But because they are typically very short, and consequently do not cover all specific cases, we include these additional rules of thumb.
- last names only, unless prompted. Exceptions for those who have someone else famous with the same name (Andrew vs Lyndon Johnson) as you will be prompted. Also exceptions for those who are known by one name.
- regnal names and number, i.e., Charles III. Failure to provide number may be prompted, but don’t count on it for television, it may even be accepted straight up.
- Titles must be exact, with the possible exception of leading articles.
- Pen names, pseudonyms, and changed names may or may not be acceptable, and original names may or may not be acceptable, but the first group is more likely to be acceptable because it was the name under which they performed the actions described in clues.
- For locations or people from areas where English is not the official language, use the current name in English.
The goals of the rules are to prevent adjudication visible to the viewer, and to insure against any ambiguity in answers that could be disputed publicly later. The reason for this stems from the game show scandals of the 1950s and the standards and practices departments of the television networks. If you or your players had to sign a contestant release form, the origin of that document is in standards and practices. While the station for this competition is local and may not have anyone with that standards and practices title, the functionality of that office exists.
What that also means is that those rules may have an influence over the content of the questions as written. If the show has been burnt by the exact definition of England versus Great Britain versus the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in a question, it may refrain from having that as an answer line. A country that changes its name, like Myanmar or eSwatini, will always have the old name as part of the clues of the question, to prevent the old name from being a valid answer to be given. This sort of thing gives us angles of attack on the possible clues that must be given, and the answers that will not be sought in a televised round. Understanding that both of those pressures exist is an advantage to apply.
Expecting to be prompted on a television show is a crapshoot and should be regarded as a desperation play when you have nothing better. In addition to knowing Standards and Practices exists, one must be aware of a little phrase “portions of the program not affecting the outcome may have been edited.” This means that as long as the decisions leading to an adjudication didn’t change, what you see on the screen may not reflect reality. Consider a question where the team answers Charles, when the full answer on the page is Charles III. Whether that is accepted, prompted for the regnal number, or rejected is dependent on the rules and upon the judge in the studio. The rules have precedence if there’s an applicable example. If the rules don’t give guidance on that specific case, the judge has precedence; and here’s a dirty little secret, the judge may lack that specific piece of expertise to know whether to accept, reject, or prompt. All of those outcomes could happen. And at that point, it’s possible that the adjudication falls under a portion of the program not affecting the outcome.
This is the point where it’s a crapshoot, because you as coach have to base your expectations on what you the viewer saw. If adjudication is visible to the viewer, there was an incident, and it was not something that could be papered over with editing. All those adjudications where the answer could be rerecorded to sound clearer for audio, or the moderator could ask them to clarify are hidden behind video cuts. You as the viewer don’t know how much of that’s there. You as the first-time coach don’t know how much of that’s there. Only after you live through a taping can you guess at how much of that is present.
Where correctness is designed to be short for the judge in televised competition, it’s designed to be as accurate to the situation as possible on the circuit. Just looking at the correctness guidelines here: https://www.naqt.com/rules/correctness-guidelines.html , we see the case law nature of it, which makes sense given each item was a situation that needed to be clarified in some match. There is no time cost to the decisions on the circuit, so even if the moderator as judge doesn’t know the applicable point, the applicable point can be found and applied by someone.