Week 72: Prepping for International Competition
WQC weekend
This is the final week before the World Quizzing Championship, and I'm spending a couple hours reviewing my first performance in 2019 to see if there's anything I can improve. This is sort of my way of running through what I can do in a week before being tested on stage, which is as close as I can get to the ideas of the new book with myself as the competitor. I finished 55th in my first-ever run, and while that's pretty satisfying for someone who was coming out of five months of forced convalescence, I feel like I could have done better with a couple of reviews that I didn't do the first time. I surprised myself by being lowest in their Sport & Games and Media categories, which feels like a place for improvement for me.
I'm aided in this by two things I did during the quiz in 2019. First, I kept my copy of the exam, so I have a complete record of where I went wrong and right. Second, whenever I had guessed on a question, but had some idea, I put a dot by the number of the question. That way I have a measure of where my knowledge went astray. If you're ever in the position of reviewing past performance in an exam like this, being able to reassess your own results should help you hone your skills for the next time. I do recognize that this is a single point of data, and I would be able to draw better conclusions from more data, but we have to go with what we've got.
Once I've split the results into four groups, I can examine the information and ask new questions of myself based on the groups.
Correct and not dotted: I know this stuff, but how close is this question to something I don't know?
Example: The question asked the name for the whites of the eyes. I knew sclera since grade school, but I don't think I'm actually that good at biology or anatomy in general, as it's my weakest science by far. Still I did not do this here because of my certainty. Prescripton to protect from backsliding in the category, review the biology I do remember from school, and see if there’s anything we can quickly cram.
Correct and dotted: Got lucky. How do we take luck out of the equation?
I lucked out identifying Eli Lilly as the pharmaceutical company in Indiana that made Prozac. I can probably identify other US industrial concerns given similar information, so I'm probably OK there. Prescription to cover adjacent knowledge: I'll make a quick perusal of major Japanese companies, and international auto manufacturers (due to a later question).
Incorrect and dotted: Got unlucky. Was this a situation where I didn't have a better guess, or I knew the correct answer and swerved out of it? Or did I not really have a good idea at all?
A question asked for the Lapland city that had Santa Claus Village. I dotted this and marked a Finnish city I thought was in Lapland, but just isn't. I wasn't going to pull this, so I don't think I need to bone up on Laplandish cities for this. Prescription to fix: nothing.
A question asked for the nation that uses the escudo as a unit of currency, I remembered that that was Portuguese language for the shields on their flag, but didn't pick the right Lusophone nation. Nothing wrong here, my logic was solid, and my memory of currencies is good except for this. Prescription to fix: maybe review the tables of the CIA World Factbook where they’re split by field, rather than by country.
I dotted a question asking for the current astrological age, mentioning the next was the Age of Aquarius. I just screwed up the direction they occur in and named Capricorn and not Pisces. Nothing I can really do with that.
Incorrect and not dotted: Were any of these ones I expected to get and was surprised to find were wrong? Or was this just a dart at the end of the time?
I misidentified Poland as the European nation with the second largest population of Catholics, only to find Spain had snuck past them. Here I was expecting there to be a small twist to the question, and didn't get it. I hadn't marked this one with a dot, but my instincts were just off. Prescription to fix: not really sure if there’s anything here, except to maybe see if there’s news articles showing changes in international census data.
In addition to this syllabus of my own errors, there at least three answers I could have had if I had really read the question properly. I missed clues that indicated an answer should have two words, one that indicated a nationality completely contrary to the answer I gave, and one that indicated an author rather than their work.
There were a few things I noticed about the writing of the questions and the clue construction. Because the quiz is a written examination, not administered orally, there is no real concept of pyramidality, so the final clues of a question aren't necessarily more obviously pushing towards an answer. All my training is counter to this. Also because it is a written test, the language of proper names contains lots of clues as to the location being referenced. This is a great help to you if you can feel which languages, and which locations can be eliminated from consideration before guessing. On the page for the first book, I noted this flowchart for determining which European language a passage of text is in, based on the letters and diacriticals present. https://ebookfriendly.com/which-european-language-reading-flowchart/ At the time, I noted it was next to useless for quiz bowl, but if you could internalize it for a written exam, you might have something. I'm not going to try to internalize all of this in time for the quiz, but it might help someone else.
I occasionally forgot the exam is written for a worldwide audience, but written by mostly European setters. There were at least two questions where I assumed a level of familiarity with an American subject equal to my familiarity, and my answer dove too deep. That I can account for next time. In the other direction, I really don't know soccer in Europe to the depth that is necessary for this. That's too late to learn, but I was probably taking the zero on 1 of 240 questions anyway.
For quiz bowl, that sort of knowing drop of a category is a major concession. However, the WQC and international quizzing in general has a fair share of categories that it doesn’t expect anyone to know in concert with each other. There are things that are designed to stump 99% of the field. When you contrast that with quiz bowl standards like, “answers should be something that 7 of 8 of the players will have at least heard of, if not could answer,” you see that there’s a sliding scale of difficulties in the quizzing questions, and a different distribution of scores resulting from it.
While I'm probably extrapolating too much from a single set of data points, I'm estimating a couple bits of answer selection that look promising to snag a couple more points.
My mythology knowledge is still predominantly quiz bowl based. This isn't much help in World Quizzing. So I should spend a little time on African/Australian/Native American/Oceanian. I can hope for Manuk Manuk, but it isn't likely to come up by itself.
There's also a trend of current events where heads of state are mentioned from the previous year. I plan on perusing rulers.org and news feeds to get the information in my head.
What I'm considering is the basic concept of writing my own questions to commit the information to memory. If this technique works for me in quiz bowl, it should work for this competition.
Next week, I'll go in detail on my performance, what I did that helped, what didn't and what I can adapt to future years, and what techniques here can apply to the book.