Quiz Bowl
Does your high school student enjoy trivia? The Quiz Bowl group at the high school has a lot of fun practicing together over lunch and battling wits with local teams, win or lose. Grades 9-12 may participate and you don’t need to be an expert.
Quiz Bowl encompasses Quiz Bowl and Knowledge Bowl tournament play, as well as NAQT format. See below for more information.
Practices and Tournaments
The Quiz Bowl advisor since 2004-05 is Kirk Walton, who competed previously on a winning Chaska High School team. Kirk is not on staff at the high school, so students lead the informal practices, which are held during lunch hour every day beginning mid-to-late October. New students can come “check it out” for the first week of practices but should be officially signed up with Student Activities to continue participating beyond that time. Students bring their lunch and eat during practice.
The regular season is late December to mid-March, but activity begins in October and ends in April. January, February and March may have 5-7 tournaments, with 1-3 tourneys in the other months. Some March tournaments may be for qualifying teams only. Some tournaments occur on school days (QB – Th, KB – Tues) and require early dismissal (2:15). Some tournaments are held on Saturdays and take up most of the day. Tournaments are held at other schools, except for possibly one at EPHS. In 2006, a televised “Face Off Minnesota” tournament was held in May at the Channel 2 studio. Hopefully, that will be an annual event and EPHS will qualify to enter their top team. National competitions are held in June (the same date for SAT test and ARML competition).
As the season progresses, formal coach-led practices will be added periodically before or after school to allow students who compete well together as a team to practice as a team (rather than split up into different lunch hours). Four or five students make up one team. The number of teams EPHS enters in a tournament will depend upon the students’ availability, the number of spots the host school has open, any tournament eligibility rules, and the activity budget for entry fees and transportation. In many cases, any QB member who wants to attend a tournament and compete on a team may do so.
If you are worried about conflicts, you may be interested in what SS, an experienced Quiz Bowl participant, had to say about the subject: “I do debate and speech, which both directly conflict with Saturday tournaments, but Kirk is so nice and understanding that it is never much of a problem. I feel a part of the team even though I cannot fully commit to it.”
Types of Questions
Questions come mainly from academic areas (geography, mathematics, various fields of science, history, art, music, etc.). Quiz Bowl format includes a current events section in every tournament. The coach and captains will try to place members on teams where a range of knowledge can be represented. Team members can vary from one tournament to another because students have conflicts with Speech, Debate, Swim Team, etc.
You may wonder if freshmen and sophomores can really compete against upperclassmen when questions may come from material they have not yet had in school, such as Chemistry, Physics or European history. In some tournaments, teams consisting only of underclassmen may compete in a separate bracket from the others. In some tournaments, EPHS may mix upperclassmen with underclassmen on a team. In some tournaments, round matchups change with the results of each round, so less experienced or less knowledgeable teams compete against each other. This does not normally result in winning tournament placement for them but does result in more chances to succeed in an individual round. In any event, valuable experience may be gained by all students who compete, whether they place well or not. Repeated exposure to tournament play results in quicker evaluation of whether to buzz in or not, and also adds to the student’s awareness of what topics are more typically involved in the questions. Students who compete for four years will have accrued much more experience to help them be winners.
Quiz Bowl Format
Quiz Bowl teams usually have 4 members competing at one time against one other team in a match. Multiple matches occur simultaneously in different rooms of the host school, and each team plays multiple rounds against multiple opponents.
Each member of the team has a buzzer. During a “tossup” round, a reader will ask a question and any player can buzz in as soon as they believe they know the answer. That player needs to answer immediately, and will earn points for her team based on the difficulty of the question. If the answer is incorrect, the reader completes the question (if the entire question has not been read), and the other team gets a chance to buzz in with an answer. There is no team consultation for the tossup round.
Tossup examples:
From www.qunlimited.com:Into what shape can a pool table be made so that whenever you hit a ball from a focal point, it caroms off the side and drops into the hole, located at the other focal point?
Answer: Ellipse
From www.patrickspress.com:
Which natural stone profile, found on everything in New Hampshire from road signs to the state quarter, fell from its mountainside in early May in Franconia Notch?
Answer: Old Man of the Mountain.
Quiz Bowl matches have a bonus round with bonus questions for the team that correctly answers the tossup question. The bonus questions are usually short questions, and the team may confer quickly before the team captain gives an answer.
Quiz Bowl tournaments use 60-second Lightning Rounds. The team that is behind in points going into the Lightning Round chooses one of the offered categories. They have one minute to correctly answer as many of the 10 questions as possible. Players can discuss before the captain gives the answers. After one minute, the opposing team gets 30 seconds to answer any questions that weren’t answered correctly. Lightning Round 2 gives the other team a category choice and first chance to answer the questions during a minute, followed by the opposing team having 30 seconds to answer any remaining questions.
Points are not taken away for wrong answers in Quiz Bowl. Invitational events have single elimination playoffs for the top teams after the preliminary rounds.
Knowledge Bowl Format
Knowledge Bowl begins in one large room where all teams of up to 5 players complete a written round of multiple choice questions, with the opportunity to consult together to fill in the answers. Teams are then matched up for oral rounds with the top three teams in one room, fourth through sixth in the next, and so on. Room placement is determined by number of points after each round. Varying bonus points may be awarded to teams for every match played in one of the top 3 rooms, helping to offset the fact that stiffer competition makes it harder to gain more points in the round.
For oral rounds, three teams compete in a room, with up to 4 members competing at a time (5-player teams will rotate players in and out for different rounds). Each team sits at separate tables with their own buzzer strip. A reader reads a question, and any team member can press the strip to buzz in when they think their team can answer. The reader stops reading at the buzzer, the team who buzzed first gets a short time to discuss, and the team captain gives an answer. A correct answer gives the team 1 point. If the answer is wrong, that team can no longer buzz in. Any other team that has buzzed in gets a chance to answer. If a team has not pressed the buzzer, the reader will continue reading the question, and the last team will have 15 seconds to answer at the conclusion of the question. There are no penalties for wrong answers.
Tournament winners are determined by total points scored throughout the tournament, including the written round.
NAQT (National Academic Quiz Tournament) Format
NAQT format is similar to Quiz Bowl, but there are bonuses for every tossup, there is a 5-point bonus for answering questions before a certain amount has been read, and there is a 5-point penalty when a team interrupts a tossup question with an incorrect answer. Questions tend to be more difficult and longer. For instance, here is a question from www.NAQT.com:
“He was the father of Chiron the centaur, and his Roman counterpart was the father of Picus, an Italian king turned into a woodpecker. He overthrew his father (*) Uranus with a sickle given to him by his mother Gaia, and when they predicted that his own son would overthrow him, he ate his first five children until Rhea, his wife, his his youngest son. For 10 points – name this Titan toppled by his son Zeus. (answer Cronos or Cronus)”
*When the question is answered correctly before the reader reads beyond the (*) point, the team gets an additional 5 power points for the answer.
Joining
Activities Rush at the high school (in late September or early October; check the Daily Bulletin) is a good time to find the Quiz Bowl booth, talk to members to see what it’s all about, and give your e-mail address if you think you are interested so you can receive messages about a parents meeting, practice start date and room #, tournament schedules, etc. If you miss the meeting and don’t know who to talk to, contact your high school site rep for that information.
You must fill out a Student Activities form for Quiz Bowl, as well as pay the activity fee, if you wish to attend practices beyond the first week or enter any tournaments. There is one fee and one signup, so don’t be confused if you see them listed separately on Student Activities forms.
Team captains encourage you to join them:
GK: "Quiz Bowl “is for people who have a thirst for knowledge, have a strong academic background, want to be surrounded by intellectuals (yes, us ?) and who love to participate in competitions. I do QB because I learn something new from it every day. My favorite areas are mental math, chemistry and world history.”
TD: “It’s a lot of fun no matter how much you think you know. Everyone contributes. I like questions on Norse mythology and general world history.”
Worried about conflicts? SS, an experienced Quiz Bowl participant, reports, “I do debate and speech, which both directly conflict with Saturday tournaments, but Kirk is so nice and understanding that it is never much of a problem. I feel a part of the team even though I cannot fully commit to it.”
Question Sources
www.greatauk.com – Knowledge Bowl questions are available here. Sign up for a free question-of-the-day via e-mail, purchase CDs of questions, check in weekly to take a free quiz on a selected subject.
www.qunlimited.com - A small number of questions/answers are available to download. Packets are available for purchase. This site also has CDs with audible music questions and Art questions with pictures.
www.naqt.com – site of the National Academic Quiz Tournaments, which includes a schedule of college events, high school events, and sometimes open tournaments where high school, college, and adult teams compete against each other for fun. Question packets may be purchased online. Used packets are often available for purchase at NAQT events. These are the more difficult questions, using the NAQT format where the question is very long and starts with lesser-known information about the topic.
There are many downloadable lists of topics that are frequently included in questions at tournaments, for instance, the top 10 Asian rivers with information about location and importance; the top 100 works of fiction with title, author, genre, and year of publication; etc. More complete and current lists can be purchased.
www.patrickspress.com – A number of sample Quiz Bowl questions can be viewed at the site. Books of practice questions can be purchased, as well as weekly or bi-weekly subscriptions to Academic Questions that include current event questions. Link to a Patricks Press blog (new in September 2006) that will be attempting to catalog questions/answers from Jeopardy and Who Wants to be a Millionaire that also appear in John Campbell’s Trivia for Dunces books.
Additional Ways to Prepare for Competition
Read books, especially classics and factual books, such as Handy Geography Answer Book and A Short History of Nearly Everything.
Read the daily paper.
Do crossword puzzles.
Watch Jeopardy.
Play trivia games, such as "Trivial Pursuit" or "Can You Beat Ken?"
Play academic games that test geography, science, vocabulary ("Scrabble"), or other knowledge.
The NAQT website (see above) has many suggested resources “for players who want to take their knowledge base—and playing ability—to the next level . . .” See their links to “References” to find suggestions of literature compilations, and check their “How To” page for varied suggestions. Bear in mind that the website serves many college teams who play this tournament style.
Minnesota Teams and Results
You can find out about high school teams, pairings, divisions, and schedules at the NAQT Minnesota Alliance. Teams are placed in divisions at the beginning of each year, taking into account their school schedules and preferences while attempting to balance teams. Find information at NAQT Minnesota Alliance