Quiz bowl facts for kids
| Other name(s) | Quizbowl, scholastic bowl, academic bowl, etc. |
|---|---|
| Years active | c. 1953–present |
| Genre(s) | Quiz |
| Players | 2–10 |
| Playing time | ~30 minutes (can vary) |
| Skill(s) required | recall, knowledge, memory, reflex |
| Material(s) required | Lockout buzzer system, questions |
Quiz bowl (quizbowl, scholar bowl, scholastic bowl, academic bowl, academic team, etc.) is a quiz-based competition that tests players on a wide variety of academic subjects. Standardized quiz bowl formats are played by lower school, middle school, high school, and university students throughout the United States, Germany, Switzerland, Canada, Asia, and the United Kingdom.
The game is typically played with a lockout buzzer system between at least two teams, usually consisting of four or five players each. A moderator reads questions to the players who try to score points for their team by buzzing first and responding with the correct answer.
Quiz bowl is most commonly played in a toss-up/bonus format, which consists of a series of two different types of questions. Other formats, particularly in local competitions, may deviate from the above rules.
Contents
Gameplay
During a quiz bowl game, two or more teams of usually up to four or five players are read questions by a moderator. In most forms of quiz bowl, there are two basic types of questions: toss-ups and bonuses. Toss-ups are questions that any individual player can attempt to answer, and players are generally not allowed to confer with each other. Conferring with your team usually results in a deduction of 5 points. Each player usually has a signaling device, also called a buzzer, to signal in at any time during the question to give an answer. If the answer given is incorrect, then no other member of that team may give an answer. If a toss-up is successfully answered, the correctly answering team is given an opportunity to answer a bonus. Bonuses are usually worth a total of 30 points, and consist of three individual questions worth ten points each. Team members are generally permitted to confer with each other on these questions.
Regional or local tournaments may dispose of any number of standard rules entirely. Some may only have toss-ups and not use bonuses at all. Some formats include a lightning round during which a team attempts to answer multiple questions as fast as possible under a given time limit, usually sixty seconds.
Match length is determined by either a game clock or the number of questions in a packet. In most formats, a game ends once the moderator has finished reading every question in a packet. Tie-breaking procedures may include reading extra toss-ups until the tie is broken or sudden-death toss-ups.
Quiz bowl tests players in a variety of academic subjects including literature, science, history, and fine arts. Additionally, some quiz bowl events may feature small amounts of popular culture content like sports, popular music, and other non-academic general knowledge subjects, although their inclusion is generally kept to a minimum.
In most quiz bowl competitions, players and coaches may protest the moderator's decision if they believe their answer was incorrectly rejected, or an opponent's answer was incorrectly accepted. Invalid protests or unnecessary protest can result in additional negs and an expulsion from the game.
Toss-ups
This instrument plays the opening Promenade in Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, as well as the rising theme C-G-C in the opening of Richard Strauss' Thus Spake Zarathustra. This instrument's tone can be lowered by one-and-a-half steps by pressing either its third or both its first and second (*) valves. For 10 points, name this brass instrument whose timbre is slightly brighter than that of a cornet.
ANSWER: 'trumpet's
Two common types of toss-ups include buzzer-beaters and pyramidal tossups. Buzzer-beaters (also known as speed check or quick-recall questions) are relatively short, rarely more than two sentences long, and contain few clues. This type of question is written specifically to test quick recall skills of players, and does not discriminate the different levels of knowledge that the players possess. These Buzzer-Beaters are not included in major state or national tournaments.
Pyramidal or pyramid-style tossups include multiple clues and are written so that each question starts with more difficult clues and moves toward easier clues. This way the player with the most knowledge of the subject being asked about has the most opportunity to answer first. Pyramidal toss-ups are considered standard for college quiz bowl.
In most formats, correctly answering a toss-up earns a team 10 points. Extra points, usually for a total of 15 or 20 points, may be awarded if a question is answered prior to a certain clue-providing keyword in the question, an action known as "powering." Answering a tossup incorrectly is called "negging" and may incur a 5-point penalty for a team. After a neg occurs, the moderator continues reading the rest of the question for the other team. There are usually no further penalties after one team has already negged.
Bonuses
These biological monomers are usually in a zwitterionic form. For 10 points each:
[10] Name this class of molecules that make up proteins, examples of which include tryptophan, alanine, and lysine.
ANSWER: amino acids
[10] During translation, amino acids are polymerized by these complexes, which are formed in the nucleolus.
ANSWER: ribosomes
[10] Some proteins can become infectious agents. This is the name of those misfolded proteins that are responsible for mad cow disease and Kuru.
ANSWER: prions
Bonuses usually have multiple parts that are related by some common thread and may or may not be related to corresponding tossup. A team is usually rewarded with 10 points upon correctly answering each bonus part. Bonuses are the only types of questions where you can confer with your team. Usually, only the team that answered the tossup correctly can answer the bonus questions, though some formats allow the opposing team to answer certain parts of the bonus not correctly answered by the team in control of the bonus, a gameplay element known as a "bounceback" or "rebound." Less-used types of bonus questions include list bonuses, which require players to give their answers from a requested list, and "30-20-10" bonuses, which give a number of discrete clues for a single answer in order of decreasing difficulty, with more points being awarded for giving the correct answer on an earlier clue. The 30-20-10 bonus was officially banned from ACF in 2008 and NAQT in 2009.
Variations
Several variations on the game of quiz bowl exist that affect question structure and content, rules of play, and round format. One standardized format is the pyramidal tossup/bonus format, which is used in NAQT and ACF (or mACF, referring to question sets produced in a similar style to those of ACF) competitions.
Many quiz bowl question producers, including ACF and NAQT, publish a distribution of the number of tossups and bonuses per round that will feature material from a given area of study.
ACF/mACF tossups are written in pyramidal style and are generally much longer than College Bowl and NAQT questions. Games are usually untimed and last until a total of 20 tossups are read. The published distribution of ACF quiz bowl emphasizes academic subjects, with very little popular culture.
NAQT is another common variation on the tossup/bonus format that balances academic rigor with a wider variety of subjects, including popular culture and an increased amount of current events and geography content. Unlike many mACF events, most questions used in this format are written and sold by NAQT themselves. NAQT also uses powers in their tossups, which reward players with 15 points instead of 10 for a tossup answered before a predetermined point. Games played on NAQT rules consist of two nine-minute halves and a total of 24 tossups. NAQT tossups are typically shorter than most other pyramidal tossups because of a character limit enforced on the questions. The format used for the now-defunct College Bowl tournament uses comparatively shorter questions. Gameplay is relatively quick as it is played in eight-minute halves, to a usual total of 22–24 tossups read.
The Honda Campus All Star Challenge and University Challenge use similar formats.
Matches played at the National Academic Championship and its affiliated tournaments are split into four quarters, with differing styles of gameplay in each phase. Individual tournaments may use worksheet quizzes, lightning rounds, or tossups without accompanying bonuses.
Preparation
Since questions are generally derived from an unofficial canon of topics, players commonly review question content from older competitions to prepare for upcoming tournaments. Several websites exist in this vein, the most commonly used being QuizDB, a navigable database of past quiz bowl tournaments; Protobowl, a multiplayer real-time quiz bowl simulator; and QuizBug 2, a single-player quiz bowl simulator. NAQT also makes monthly free articles titled "You Gotta Know" on different topics that commonly occur in tournaments.
Players also research and write questions to prepare for quiz bowl. Active participation in academic coursework can also serve as means of preparing for quiz bowl. Blind memorization of high-frequency out-of-context facts, often referred to as "stock" clues, is a common method of quiz bowl preparation, but is generally discouraged for the lack of academic utility in doing so. Team members often specialize in a few subjects. Players benefit from exposure to a broad range of school and cultural subjects, memorization, and study skills, and an improved ability to cooperate and work in teams.
NAQT also sells lists of topics that are frequently asked about in their questions.
Competitions
Quiz bowl is primarily played at single-day tournaments. Some events have eligibility rules that dictate who may participate, such as allowing only freshman and sophomore players or excluding graduate students from playing. Additionally, most tournaments allow multiple teams from a single school to compete.
Some schools hold intramural tournaments where any team formed from students can play. High school-level quiz bowl is occasionally played over an extended period of time by schools within an area or preexisting athletic conference or even in single matches against other schools.
Some regional variants organized for grade school students include Knowledge Bowl, Ohio Academic Competition (OAC), Florida's Commissioner's Academic Challenge (CAC), and various television quiz competitions such as It's Academic. Athletic and activities associations in some US states also organize quiz bowl competitions, including Missouri's MSHSAA, Illinois's IHSA, Kansas's KSHSAA, and Virginia's VHSL.
Additionally, various formats have been developed to test knowledge in specific areas like the Bible, classics, science, and agricultural science. DECA runs quiz bowl events at their competitions that tests knowledge on business and market topics. Gallaudet University sponsors a National Academic Bowl for deaf university students. Tournaments designated as "trash" focus on pop culture and sports trivia questions.
National tournaments
There are several collegiate-level national championship tournaments for which teams usually qualify through regional competitions. They include:
- NAQT's Intercollegiate Championship Tournament (ICT)
- NAQT's Community College Championship Tournament (CCCT)
- ACF Nationals
- Honda Campus All-Star Challenge (HCASC)
Several national competitions are conducted in the United States every year for high school students. Compared to the college level, there are usually more tournaments at which teams can qualify. National tournaments include:
- NAQT's High School National Championship Tournament (HSNCT)
- Partnership for Academic Competition Excellence's National Scholastic Championship (PACE NSC)
- The National Academic Association and Question Unlimited's National Academic Championship (NAC)
- JROTC Leadership and Academic Bowl (JLAB)
The following high school tournaments are for single all-star teams from each US state or other political subdivision:
- National All-Star Academic Tournament (NASAT)
- National Tournament of Academic Excellence (NTAE) (formerly known as the Panasonic Academic Challenge)
Beginning in 2018, NAQT has organized the Individual Player National Championship Tournament (IPNCT). Since 2019, IPNCT has been separated into high school and middle school divisions.
Educational value
Some proponents of reform seek to increase the educational value and fairness of quiz bowl, primarily by using pyramidal questions. Many competitions at grade school levels are criticized for their use of speed-check questions, which encourage participants to rely more on their ability to buzz in quickly than on knowledge of the subjects tested. Some tournaments such as College Bowl are criticized for being insufficiently academic, including superfluous clues in their questions, and for recycling questions from previous years. The use of "hoses," misleading clues that discourage players from buzzing in too early, is also considered a mark of "bad" quiz bowl. The use of mathematical computation problems in tossups is criticized by some for rewarding fast problem solving skills over conceptual knowledge and being non-pyramidal. Pyramidal questions are sometimes criticized for containing obscure information and being unsuitable for television.
Broadcasting
Quiz bowl shows have been on television for many decades in some areas and usually feature competitors from local high schools. Many of these competitions may have rules and formats that differ slightly from standardized quiz bowl.
College Bowl was broadcast on NBC radio from 1953 to 1955. The program moved to television as General Electric College Bowl and was broadcast from 1959 to 1970, first on CBS and later on NBC. College Bowl would return to CBS radio from 1979 to 1982, and HCASC was broadcast on BET from 1990 to 1995. The Texaco Star National Academic Championship ran from 1989 to 1991 on Discovery Channel and was hosted by Chip Beall and Mark L. Walberg. In 1994, it was syndicated as the Star Challenge and hosted by Mark L. Walberg. University Challenge is licensed from CBCI by Granada TV Ltd. and broadcast in the United Kingdom. Reach for the Top, a Canadian competition with a quiz bowl-like format, has been broadcast on the CBC in the past.
Game show contestants
Quiz bowl has received media coverage due to the number of highly successful game show contestants with backgrounds in the activity. NAQT maintains a list of current and former quiz bowl players at any level who have appeared on TV game shows. Several of the top dollar winners in the history of Jeopardy! include former players such as Ken Jennings, Matt Jackson, David Madden, and Brad Rutter. Such is the correlation between success on Jeopardy! and quiz bowl experience that Jennings described the competition as a "minor league" for the show and other televised quiz show competitions.
