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Contents
How do I study for quiz bowl?
NAQT hopes that quiz bowl will introduce players to new ideas, books, disciplines, and interests. Reading original texts (novels, dramas, poems, and other literature, of course, but also historiography, science textbooks, and similar sources) is generally the most comprehensive way to study.
How do you do well at quiz bowl?
Pay attention in class – Being a good student is the easiest way to become a good Quizbowl player. Quizbowl’s distribution is academic, so you will gain a lot of knowledge from your classes. Go to club practices – Try to come at least once a week (the more, the better!). Make sure to focus hard and pay attention!
How do you prepare for a quiz bowl competition?
- Study more challenging questions. …
- Study the current year’s college questions. …
- Prepare for an endurance challenge. …
- Assign roles for who will give answers and when. …
- Know the rules. …
- Think about potential close-game scenarios.
How do you get better at literature quiz bowl?
Obviously reading books takes much longer than learning stock clues for books so you should try to find a nice balance where you can learn clues about books as you go through reading the works you need to read for quizbowl, just make sure you don’t focus so much on memorizing clues that you give up reading.
How do you study quiz?
- Get informed. Don’t walk into your test unprepared for what you will face. …
- Think like your teacher. …
- Make your own study aids. …
- Practice for the inevitable. …
- Study every day. …
- Cut out the distractions. …
- Divide big concepts from smaller details. …
- Don’t neglect the “easy” stuff.
How can I practice my academic team?
Ways to Prepare for the Competition:
1) Play practice matches against staff and teachers at your school. 2) Practice during lunch with your teammates. 3) Develop flash cards and practice with your teammates. 4) Read USA Today newspaper or check cnn.com, usatoday.com, and other news websites for current events.
How does a quiz bowl work?
What Is Quiz Bowl? Quiz bowl is a game in which two teams compete head-to-head to answer questions from all areas of knowledge, including history, literature, science, fine arts, current events, popular culture, sports, and more. There are also tournaments for individual players rather than teams.
How do you prepare for a history Bowl?
- Come to as many Monday morning meeting times as possible and practice times arranged by email.
- Use your intervention time to study each of the history.com topic sites. …
- Take the Ultimate History Quiz and Lunch Quiz as much as possible on the History.com website.
What is high school quiz bowl?
Quiz Bowl is a game or competition in which two teams compete head-to-head to answer questions from all general areas of knowledge including history, literature, science, fine arts, current events, sports, popular culture, and more. You can think of it as similar to a team version of high school Jeopardy.
How does an academic bowl work?
During a quiz bowl game, two teams of usually up to four or five players are read questions by a moderator. Each player usually has an electronic buzzer to signal in (“buzz”) at any time during the question to give an answer.
How do you prepare for an academic competition?
Before a match begins, visualize what could come up–such as questions or how you’ll give your team an early lead. Give yourself at least a couple hours before the competition to do some light reviewing, but avoid over-studying, as you could end up losing track of concepts.
How do you prepare for a history Bowl?
- Come to as many Monday morning meeting times as possible and practice times arranged by email.
- Use your intervention time to study each of the history.com topic sites. …
- Take the Ultimate History Quiz and Lunch Quiz as much as possible on the History.com website.
How does an academic bowl work?
During a quiz bowl game, two teams of usually up to four or five players are read questions by a moderator. Each player usually has an electronic buzzer to signal in (“buzz”) at any time during the question to give an answer.
What is high school quiz bowl?
Quiz Bowl is a game or competition in which two teams compete head-to-head to answer questions from all general areas of knowledge including history, literature, science, fine arts, current events, sports, popular culture, and more. You can think of it as similar to a team version of high school Jeopardy.
How does Scholars Bowl work?
Scholars’ Bowl is a competition in which participants attempt to quickly and accurately answer trivia questions from all academic areas of study. It is similar to Jeopardy but with a team concept. The game rewards both individual excellence and teamwork.
NAQT | Improving as a Player
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- Summary of article content: Articles about NAQT | Improving as a Player NAQT does not recommend practicing with one-fact, Trivial Pursuit- questions if the goal is team improvement; these questions do not represent quiz bowl as … …
- Most searched keywords: Whether you are looking for NAQT | Improving as a Player NAQT does not recommend practicing with one-fact, Trivial Pursuit- questions if the goal is team improvement; these questions do not represent quiz bowl as … National Academic Quiz Tournaments, LLC, organizes the premier middle school, high school, community college, and college national quiz bowl championships in North America.
- Table of Contents:
Competing
Practicing
Writing Questions
Studying You Gotta Know Lists
Reading
Reference Works
Lists
The 99 Critical Shots of Quiz Bowl
Notebooks
Current Events
Visual Art
NAQT | Improving as a Player
- Article author: www.naqt.com
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- Most searched keywords: Whether you are looking for NAQT | Improving as a Player Updating National Academic Quiz Tournaments, LLC, organizes the premier middle school, high school, community college, and college national quiz bowl championships in North America.
- Table of Contents:
Competing
Practicing
Writing Questions
Studying You Gotta Know Lists
Reading
Reference Works
Lists
The 99 Critical Shots of Quiz Bowl
Notebooks
Current Events
Visual Art
How to Improve | Colonel By Reach & Quizbowl
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- Most searched keywords: Whether you are looking for How to Improve | Colonel By Reach & Quizbowl Updating Note: See this page, this page, and this page on more advice on how to improve. Note: Please read this page first to understand what I mean when I say “synthesis of knowledge”, “shallow knowledge”, and “deep knowledge”.For Beginners/NovicesKnow your strengths – Category specialization is the way to go for creating teams. It’s usually better to…
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How to Prepare for Quizbowl National Tournaments: 8 Tips | GPQB
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- Most searched keywords: Whether you are looking for How to Prepare for Quizbowl National Tournaments: 8 Tips | GPQB Updating This year [2018], Pennsylvania has an incredible 23 teams attending the NAQT HSNCT, 8 teams attending the NAQT SSNCT, and several attending the PACE NSC (you can see our full guide to the different national championships here). So what should Pennsylvanian scholars (and those elsewhere) be doing to prepare for the challenge of nationals? Here are…
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Improving Literature Knowledge? – The Quizbowl Resource Center
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How can I get better at Quiz Bowl? | GPQB
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- Summary of article content: Articles about How can I get better at Quiz Bowl? | GPQB Making sure to “quizbowl-ify” your knowledge is one of the keys to improving at quizbowl. It is also important to have enough confence and intuition to buzz … …
- Most searched keywords: Whether you are looking for How can I get better at Quiz Bowl? | GPQB Making sure to “quizbowl-ify” your knowledge is one of the keys to improving at quizbowl. It is also important to have enough confence and intuition to buzz … Interested in specific sets of questions to study and a plan for organizing your studying as you improve? Check out our guide for studying quizbowl tournament questions here. Improving at quiz bowl is simply a matter of motivation and hard work. You must be motivated to push yourself to learn in and out of both the…
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Greater Pennsylvania Quiz Bowl
3 comments
Error 403 (Forbidden)
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- Summary of article content: Articles about Error 403 (Forbidden) Going to and taking notes helps. Completing the assigned reading before you go to and asking questions about what you don’t understand helps. Doing … …
- Most searched keywords: Whether you are looking for Error 403 (Forbidden) Going to and taking notes helps. Completing the assigned reading before you go to and asking questions about what you don’t understand helps. Doing …
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Making the most of quiz bowl practice
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- Summary of article content: Articles about Making the most of quiz bowl practice The best way to prepare students to answer questions in tournaments is to have them answer questions in practice. Read sample questions in … …
- Most searched keywords: Whether you are looking for Making the most of quiz bowl practice The best way to prepare students to answer questions in tournaments is to have them answer questions in practice. Read sample questions in … The first tournaments of the year are quickly approaching, and you might be starting to practice for tournaments with your team. Since you have limited time to meet with your team for practice, how do you optimize your time at practice? Read Questions in Practice The best way to prepare students to answer questions in tournaments is to have them answer questions in practice. Read sample questions in practice and have them answer them. (If you have access to buzzers, let them buzz in to answer thEducation
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What/How To Study – The Quizbowl Resource Center
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- Summary of article content: Articles about What/How To Study – The Quizbowl Resource Center Don’t forget to attend practice and play tournaments. You will learn things just from hearing questions. Also get a notebook, and write down the … …
- Most searched keywords: Whether you are looking for What/How To Study – The Quizbowl Resource Center Don’t forget to attend practice and play tournaments. You will learn things just from hearing questions. Also get a notebook, and write down the …
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How to Improve | Colonel By Reach & Quizbowl
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- Summary of article content: Articles about How to Improve | Colonel By Reach & Quizbowl How to Improve · WRITE QUESTIONS – All experienced players should write questions. · Bonuses, Bonuses, Bonuses – It seems that tossups are much more studied than … …
- Most searched keywords: Whether you are looking for How to Improve | Colonel By Reach & Quizbowl How to Improve · WRITE QUESTIONS – All experienced players should write questions. · Bonuses, Bonuses, Bonuses – It seems that tossups are much more studied than … Note: See this page, this page, and this page on more advice on how to improve. Note: Please read this page first to understand what I mean when I say “synthesis of knowledge”, “shallow knowledge”, and “deep knowledge”.For Beginners/NovicesKnow your strengths – Category specialization is the way to go for creating teams. It’s usually better to…
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Free Quiz Bowl Flashcards
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Improving as a Player
Contents
Improving as a Player
Like nearly all activities in which score is kept, quiz bowl is fun to play on a casual, social level without investing significant time in improving one’s ability. Nonetheless, it is a competitive endeavor, and no national championship has ever been won by a team—however intelligent and educated—that had just sat down to play for the very first time. Winning consistently at the highest level has only been brought about by diligent, directed preparations. This article describes ten methods that players have successfully used to improve themselves and offers some links to resources that might be useful in pursuing them. These suggestions should be equally applicable to any level of play (middle school, high school, community college, college), though the actual material that one should study will vary.
Competing The most obvious (and most enjoyable) route to improvement as a player is actually competing in quiz bowl matches. In addition to simply hearing questions (and their answers!), there is no substitute for real tournaments when it comes to the non-knowledge-related parts of the game: working together on bonuses, developing the intuition to anticipate questions, shaking off the effects of a bad buzz, and simply hearing and processing clues in the rapid-fire way in which they are often delivered. Teams and players who are serious about getting better should compete as often as their schedule, drivers, and budget allow; you can find NAQT tournaments on NAQT’s schedule page, while others are listed on The Quizbowl Resource Center site. As a general rule, tournaments are interested in having everybody attend, particularly new schools. Registration is usually easy (typically consisting of registering online using your naqt.com account or sending an email to the tournament director). Most tournaments are willing to take more than one team from a school and often discount teams beyond the first, so there’s no need to artificially limit your institution to one team if you have lots of interested players. Sometimes tournaments will even allow players from different schools to play together (with such teams being designated as ineligible to win the tournament); if you have an “extra” player or two, ask if this would be allowed so that your own playing time or that of your teammates or students isn’t reduced by being forced to alternate. If tournaments are scarce in your region, you can host your own or start a local league. NAQT can supply questions for such an event or, if you have a lot of time, you can write your own. NAQT is also more than willing to offer advice on planning your event and can provide contact lists for nearby schools to invite. In short, play as frequently as you can. This is most important for beginning players who need to develop a sense of “what comes up” and “when should I buzz?”. As players mature and begin attending harder tournaments, the value of more concentrated, knowledge-based preparation (i.e., “studying”) rises, but in the beginning, there is nothing better than actual matches.
Practicing Real competition is better, but practice can fulfill some of the same objectives. If you have a choice of practice materials, you’ll want to choose those that are similar to those at the competitions you will be entering and that are as hard as possible without being demoralizing; harder questions will expose you to more answers and more clues, which serve players better in the long run than packets in which nine-tenths of the bonus points are converted. For formats, like NAQT’s, that feature both tossups and bonuses, it is important to resist the temptation to only play tossups if the true goal is improvement; bonuses contain the harder questions and the harder clues and there is a great deal of value in just knowing that a certain answer exists—oftentimes a difficult tossup can be answered at the end, on the giveaway clue, without knowing anything substantive about the subject. In addition, it is a truism that new topics enter the quiz bowl “canon” as bonus parts and eventually become tossup answers. Practicing on bonuses will introduce you to these topics earlier rather than later. NAQT does not recommend practicing with one-fact, Trivial Pursuit-style questions if the goal is team improvement; these questions do not represent quiz bowl as played at the level of national competition and the impressive reaction speed that might be realized is simply not equal to the benefit that could be gained from practicing on pyramidal questions. Please note that NAQT has no opinion whatsoever on the value of things done for fun or in order to attract new players or as fundraisers; if you enjoy playing one-clue tossups or Trivial Pursuit, that’s absolutely fine, but it will not serve to raise the level of your quiz bowl play to that required of national championship contenders. Most teams, however, don’t have a real choice as to practice materials—they go so quickly that, quite soon, everything that is available has been played. If you need additional practice materials, here are some choices: NAQT has individual sample packets available for download. These will only last you a game, but if you are just starting out, it is better than nothing.
NAQT also sells tournament sets from previous years as practice material. The Invitational Series sets will serve as excellent preparation for high school, community college, and young college teams. Experienced college teams will want to practice on Sectional Championship Sets.
You will also want to acquire the sets used as tournaments you attend; most hosts will give them to you afterwards.
There are also free question sets available at the Quizbowl Packet Archive. As they come from authors and editors all over the country and were written with many styles and distributions in mind, the quality and difficulty is highly variable. Almost all of these sets are in the ubiquitous tossup-bonus format used at the college level. If you are interested in such things, play the sets in chronological order and watch the game’s standards evolve toward those of the present day. Most national-caliber teams practice four to six hours per week with new questions whenever they can obtain them. Again, there is no obligation to work this hard to participate in and enjoy quiz bowl, but if you want to win at the national level, it will probably take that much commitment from yourself and your teammates.
Writing Questions Writing questions is a traditional and proven way of improving as a player; few things fix new facts in a way that is as likely to assist their recall during matches as actually framing questions that use them. That said, writing questions is very time-consuming (and writing competition-quality questions even more so); experienced players sometimes question its return per invested-hour when compared with other approaches. Sometimes question-writing can’t be avoided; many invitational tournaments at the collegiate level (and a smaller number at the high school level) require that teams submit a packet, so it helps to have a store of pristine questions for your share of the packet or, at the very least, a developed sense of what resources you’ll want to use and what will make for a good question. Question writing is most useful in your weakest areas as a player; those are the areas in which reading (or at least skimming) reference works, verifying facts, and thinking of ways to connect the subject to what you are already know are most valuable. It’s easier to write questions in your fields of expertise, but doesn’t produce as much improvement. It never hurts to write two or three questions on the same subject, just to cover the material and phrase the clues in different ways. Take careful note of interesting anecdotes or links to other subjects—these will also appeal to other people and will be chosen as lead-ins to their own questions on the topic. Also note the first things listed in encyclopedia articles; these will often be the facts that end up as giveaways. This document isn’t a primer on question writing, but there are several such guides available on the Web. Not everything in those documents is accepted by modern players (or was accepted by their contemporaries), but, by and large, they are useful guides to producing questions. If at all possible, you’ll want to get experienced players to review your questions, particularly if they are going to be read at a tournament. If you have trouble motivating yourself to write, you could try writing questions for practice (perhaps competing with teammates such that the writer of the fewest buys age-appropriate drinks for the others). As your writing matures, you could also start writing freelance packets for tournament playoffs (watch The Quizbowl Resource Center for advertisements) in exchange for practice material or money and/or even writing for NAQT itself.
Studying You Gotta Know Lists Each month NAQT publishes a short article of topics that players “gotta know”. These contain ten (or so) items that come up over and over again in quiz bowl, either because of their intrinsic importance (mostly) or their idiosyncratic appeal. A Division I collegiate team would be expected to know nearly everything on the lists from their giveaways. A high school team that knew everything on the lists would probably be in a position to do extremely well at nationals. There’s obviously a lot more that gets asked about than what is in the articles, but measured in terms of points earned per fact learned, these are the subjects to start with.
Reading NAQT hopes that quiz bowl will introduce players to new ideas, books, disciplines, and interests. Reading original texts (novels, dramas, poems, and other literature, of course, but also historiography, science textbooks, and similar sources) is generally the most comprehensive way to study. It can be inefficient, but it is rewarding in ways beyond quiz bowl. Teams would do well to have players who have collectively read everything on our list of most frequently asked works of literature; questions about these works will not hesitate to ask about characters, settings, plot points, and general themes, with the detail required increasing at each level of play. Conversely, for works that come up less often, knowing the author, the name of the major character, and the single most important plot element, will often garner the full 30 points on a bonus. As a way to quickly get started, NAQT recommends collections of summaries of important works.
Reference Works Another good way to prepare is by reading reference works that go over wide swathes of history or learning; particularly good are those that purport to enumerate what everybody should have learned (or be in the process of learning) in high school. These would include The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy and An Incomplete Education. Similarly useful are works that link together developments and ideas from different disciplines (such as A Short History of Everything) or which are general histories of one kind of knowledge (like The Discoverers). These often derive much of their entertainment value from interesting facts and anecdotes about discoverers or discoveries and it is exactly those anecdotes that tend to find their way into questions. It’s also true that there aren’t so many of these books around—you are likely to read some that are also used as references by the people, whoever they may be, who are writing the questions for your next tournament. Clearly, writers who use any of these popular sources should make doubly sure that their questions aren’t merely summaries of the articles and don’t duplicate any of the peculiar phrases found in them!
Lists The most stereotypical, most mocked, and least fun means of preparing for tournaments is studying lists of facts. There are many good topics: foreign capitals, Nobel Prize winners, geologic periods, European monarchs, Chinese dynasties, authors of novels, artists of paintings, nicknames of symphonies, vice presidents of presidents, and so forth. Even just a few practice games will suggest many other common linkages that could be put into tabular form and memorized. This is a powerful tool for those with the proper motivation, but it is best leavened with reading, question writing, and actual gameplay, because the time spent on the pure lists of facts will go much further with mental structures to which to attach them. Learning that Christopher Isherwood wrote Goodbye to Berlin will not stick in the mind nearly so well if you know nothing else about him. Conversely knowing something about Isherwood will make it easier to buzz on the words “wrote Goodbye” if the previous clues in the question suggest 1930s’ Germany. NAQT sells frequency list study guides of the works of literature, art, music, and non-fiction, as well as notable people and topics in military history that have come up most frequently since its very first packet set in 1996. The lists include the title of the work, the creator, the genre of the work, and its year of creation. The lists are also available on a subscription basis so you can get updated ones each year at a fraction of the cost of the original. Don’t be afraid to study lists if you think that your team has a shot at greatness; nearly all top-echelon players have done so at some point in their careers. Just don’t allow lists to become the principal focus of your preparation.
The 99 Critical Shots of Quiz Bowl NAQT member Dwight Kidder has written an e-book, The 99 Critical Shots of Quiz Bowl, covering 99 of the most common themes for bonus questions. Reading it should improve both teams’ bonus conversion (by helping them anticipate questions’ contents) and teams’ ability to write quality bonus questions. The book also covers many best practices of team development and coaching. Its Facebook page extends the conversation with weekly articles on topics that are relevant to coaches and players alike.
Notebooks A technique that several players have used with great success is taking a pocket notebook to tournaments and practices. The idea is not to record every single unknown fact for later memorization, but to make a list of answers of which you have never, or only vaguely, heard. After the tournament, you should go through the notebook and look up basic information (an online encyclopedia article, perhaps) about each one so that you will at least know the giveaway clues if the answer comes up again. Even better would be the practice of writing a question or two about each new topic to cement the knowledge. This is more useful than it sounds because once a topic has come up in quiz bowl it is very likely to do so again. Players writing questions for invitational tournaments will tend to write about subjects that they know have been asked before; many are also intrigued by new topics and new ideas and the circulation of tournament questions as practice material ensures that many other players will have heard the same new question as you and been motivated to learn about it as well. And if they learn about it by writing questions, those questions will probably end up being submitted to a tournament. The overall difficulty of the collegiate circuit began to dramatically increase after 1993 when the widespread availability of the Internet made it easier to organize tournaments and purchase practice material; as teams practiced on questions from all over the country, answers that had previously been considered new, or even impossibly difficult, became comparatively commonplace and teams accepted the growth of what was considered “askable” as a fact of the game. A similar phenomenon has taken place at the level of nationals-caliber high school teams. This is good in the sense that players are exposed to a great deal more information and have undoubtedly learned much to stay competitive, but it has also raised the bar for new players and new schools looking to get involved; in 1993 four well-read students from a variety of majors could form a team that expected to win some of its games at its first tournament. In 2003 it’s unlikely that four inexperienced players could take even one match from varsity teams with two years’ experience. Younger teams shouldn’t despair, though; there are plenty of novice tournaments and other events with them in mind and everybody improves with practice. Everything that you ever hear a question on, you will eventually hear another question on, so take the time to learn at least the basic facts behind every answer you encounter.
Current Events A significant element of NAQT play consists of questions about current events, with about 50% of the material pertaining to the United States and 50% to the rest of the world. You can prepare for these by subscribing to—and reading—just about any newspaper, news magazine, or Internet news site. Almost all such questions will be from the past 18 months, with most focusing on the previous six. NAQT emphasizes events of major importance—diplomatic initiatives, economic policies, elections, military actions, natural disasters, scientific discoveries, etc—and will ask relatively few questions about scandals or crimes. It shouldn’t be hard to pick out the major news threads of the past several months and make notes of the people, places, groups, and ideas involved. At the very least, you’ll want to be able to name recent Nobel Prize winners, the current cabinet, leaders of major countries, recent Supreme Court decisions, and prominent senators and governors.
Visual Art Few middle or high schools offer courses on art history and, while many colleges and universities do, not many quiz bowlers elect to make one part of their electives. Nonetheless, NAQT (and nearly every other group of question writers) believes the fine arts to be an important part of a well-rounded education and devote a significant, if small, quota to painting and sculpture. These questions are low-hanging fruit for players willing to expend some time preparing since there are relatively few works of visual art that come up with any regularity, in part because the lack of a standardized curriculum prevents detailed questions about harder works. Looking up those works would be an excellent way to have a good shot at the half-dozen-or-so painting and sculpture tossups per tournament. NAQT favors questions that describe the composition, detail, symbolism, and style of works of art (rather than just asking for their creators), so you’ll want to make sure you can recognize the painting or sculpture from a description.
These are ten ideas that have worked for players in the past and which we recommend to teams interested in taking their game to the next level. We would be very interested in hearing from experienced players about other techniques that have helped them prepare for tournaments.
How-To Guides NAQT has prepared a series of articles about how to accomplish important things in quiz bowl. Read Articles Start a Team NAQT has written guides to starting quiz bowl teams: Middle School High School College
Improving as a Player
Contents
Improving as a Player
Like nearly all activities in which score is kept, quiz bowl is fun to play on a casual, social level without investing significant time in improving one’s ability. Nonetheless, it is a competitive endeavor, and no national championship has ever been won by a team—however intelligent and educated—that had just sat down to play for the very first time. Winning consistently at the highest level has only been brought about by diligent, directed preparations. This article describes ten methods that players have successfully used to improve themselves and offers some links to resources that might be useful in pursuing them. These suggestions should be equally applicable to any level of play (middle school, high school, community college, college), though the actual material that one should study will vary.
Competing The most obvious (and most enjoyable) route to improvement as a player is actually competing in quiz bowl matches. In addition to simply hearing questions (and their answers!), there is no substitute for real tournaments when it comes to the non-knowledge-related parts of the game: working together on bonuses, developing the intuition to anticipate questions, shaking off the effects of a bad buzz, and simply hearing and processing clues in the rapid-fire way in which they are often delivered. Teams and players who are serious about getting better should compete as often as their schedule, drivers, and budget allow; you can find NAQT tournaments on NAQT’s schedule page, while others are listed on The Quizbowl Resource Center site. As a general rule, tournaments are interested in having everybody attend, particularly new schools. Registration is usually easy (typically consisting of registering online using your naqt.com account or sending an email to the tournament director). Most tournaments are willing to take more than one team from a school and often discount teams beyond the first, so there’s no need to artificially limit your institution to one team if you have lots of interested players. Sometimes tournaments will even allow players from different schools to play together (with such teams being designated as ineligible to win the tournament); if you have an “extra” player or two, ask if this would be allowed so that your own playing time or that of your teammates or students isn’t reduced by being forced to alternate. If tournaments are scarce in your region, you can host your own or start a local league. NAQT can supply questions for such an event or, if you have a lot of time, you can write your own. NAQT is also more than willing to offer advice on planning your event and can provide contact lists for nearby schools to invite. In short, play as frequently as you can. This is most important for beginning players who need to develop a sense of “what comes up” and “when should I buzz?”. As players mature and begin attending harder tournaments, the value of more concentrated, knowledge-based preparation (i.e., “studying”) rises, but in the beginning, there is nothing better than actual matches.
Practicing Real competition is better, but practice can fulfill some of the same objectives. If you have a choice of practice materials, you’ll want to choose those that are similar to those at the competitions you will be entering and that are as hard as possible without being demoralizing; harder questions will expose you to more answers and more clues, which serve players better in the long run than packets in which nine-tenths of the bonus points are converted. For formats, like NAQT’s, that feature both tossups and bonuses, it is important to resist the temptation to only play tossups if the true goal is improvement; bonuses contain the harder questions and the harder clues and there is a great deal of value in just knowing that a certain answer exists—oftentimes a difficult tossup can be answered at the end, on the giveaway clue, without knowing anything substantive about the subject. In addition, it is a truism that new topics enter the quiz bowl “canon” as bonus parts and eventually become tossup answers. Practicing on bonuses will introduce you to these topics earlier rather than later. NAQT does not recommend practicing with one-fact, Trivial Pursuit-style questions if the goal is team improvement; these questions do not represent quiz bowl as played at the level of national competition and the impressive reaction speed that might be realized is simply not equal to the benefit that could be gained from practicing on pyramidal questions. Please note that NAQT has no opinion whatsoever on the value of things done for fun or in order to attract new players or as fundraisers; if you enjoy playing one-clue tossups or Trivial Pursuit, that’s absolutely fine, but it will not serve to raise the level of your quiz bowl play to that required of national championship contenders. Most teams, however, don’t have a real choice as to practice materials—they go so quickly that, quite soon, everything that is available has been played. If you need additional practice materials, here are some choices: NAQT has individual sample packets available for download. These will only last you a game, but if you are just starting out, it is better than nothing.
NAQT also sells tournament sets from previous years as practice material. The Invitational Series sets will serve as excellent preparation for high school, community college, and young college teams. Experienced college teams will want to practice on Sectional Championship Sets.
You will also want to acquire the sets used as tournaments you attend; most hosts will give them to you afterwards.
There are also free question sets available at the Quizbowl Packet Archive. As they come from authors and editors all over the country and were written with many styles and distributions in mind, the quality and difficulty is highly variable. Almost all of these sets are in the ubiquitous tossup-bonus format used at the college level. If you are interested in such things, play the sets in chronological order and watch the game’s standards evolve toward those of the present day. Most national-caliber teams practice four to six hours per week with new questions whenever they can obtain them. Again, there is no obligation to work this hard to participate in and enjoy quiz bowl, but if you want to win at the national level, it will probably take that much commitment from yourself and your teammates.
Writing Questions Writing questions is a traditional and proven way of improving as a player; few things fix new facts in a way that is as likely to assist their recall during matches as actually framing questions that use them. That said, writing questions is very time-consuming (and writing competition-quality questions even more so); experienced players sometimes question its return per invested-hour when compared with other approaches. Sometimes question-writing can’t be avoided; many invitational tournaments at the collegiate level (and a smaller number at the high school level) require that teams submit a packet, so it helps to have a store of pristine questions for your share of the packet or, at the very least, a developed sense of what resources you’ll want to use and what will make for a good question. Question writing is most useful in your weakest areas as a player; those are the areas in which reading (or at least skimming) reference works, verifying facts, and thinking of ways to connect the subject to what you are already know are most valuable. It’s easier to write questions in your fields of expertise, but doesn’t produce as much improvement. It never hurts to write two or three questions on the same subject, just to cover the material and phrase the clues in different ways. Take careful note of interesting anecdotes or links to other subjects—these will also appeal to other people and will be chosen as lead-ins to their own questions on the topic. Also note the first things listed in encyclopedia articles; these will often be the facts that end up as giveaways. This document isn’t a primer on question writing, but there are several such guides available on the Web. Not everything in those documents is accepted by modern players (or was accepted by their contemporaries), but, by and large, they are useful guides to producing questions. If at all possible, you’ll want to get experienced players to review your questions, particularly if they are going to be read at a tournament. If you have trouble motivating yourself to write, you could try writing questions for practice (perhaps competing with teammates such that the writer of the fewest buys age-appropriate drinks for the others). As your writing matures, you could also start writing freelance packets for tournament playoffs (watch The Quizbowl Resource Center for advertisements) in exchange for practice material or money and/or even writing for NAQT itself.
Studying You Gotta Know Lists Each month NAQT publishes a short article of topics that players “gotta know”. These contain ten (or so) items that come up over and over again in quiz bowl, either because of their intrinsic importance (mostly) or their idiosyncratic appeal. A Division I collegiate team would be expected to know nearly everything on the lists from their giveaways. A high school team that knew everything on the lists would probably be in a position to do extremely well at nationals. There’s obviously a lot more that gets asked about than what is in the articles, but measured in terms of points earned per fact learned, these are the subjects to start with.
Reading NAQT hopes that quiz bowl will introduce players to new ideas, books, disciplines, and interests. Reading original texts (novels, dramas, poems, and other literature, of course, but also historiography, science textbooks, and similar sources) is generally the most comprehensive way to study. It can be inefficient, but it is rewarding in ways beyond quiz bowl. Teams would do well to have players who have collectively read everything on our list of most frequently asked works of literature; questions about these works will not hesitate to ask about characters, settings, plot points, and general themes, with the detail required increasing at each level of play. Conversely, for works that come up less often, knowing the author, the name of the major character, and the single most important plot element, will often garner the full 30 points on a bonus. As a way to quickly get started, NAQT recommends collections of summaries of important works.
Reference Works Another good way to prepare is by reading reference works that go over wide swathes of history or learning; particularly good are those that purport to enumerate what everybody should have learned (or be in the process of learning) in high school. These would include The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy and An Incomplete Education. Similarly useful are works that link together developments and ideas from different disciplines (such as A Short History of Everything) or which are general histories of one kind of knowledge (like The Discoverers). These often derive much of their entertainment value from interesting facts and anecdotes about discoverers or discoveries and it is exactly those anecdotes that tend to find their way into questions. It’s also true that there aren’t so many of these books around—you are likely to read some that are also used as references by the people, whoever they may be, who are writing the questions for your next tournament. Clearly, writers who use any of these popular sources should make doubly sure that their questions aren’t merely summaries of the articles and don’t duplicate any of the peculiar phrases found in them!
Lists The most stereotypical, most mocked, and least fun means of preparing for tournaments is studying lists of facts. There are many good topics: foreign capitals, Nobel Prize winners, geologic periods, European monarchs, Chinese dynasties, authors of novels, artists of paintings, nicknames of symphonies, vice presidents of presidents, and so forth. Even just a few practice games will suggest many other common linkages that could be put into tabular form and memorized. This is a powerful tool for those with the proper motivation, but it is best leavened with reading, question writing, and actual gameplay, because the time spent on the pure lists of facts will go much further with mental structures to which to attach them. Learning that Christopher Isherwood wrote Goodbye to Berlin will not stick in the mind nearly so well if you know nothing else about him. Conversely knowing something about Isherwood will make it easier to buzz on the words “wrote Goodbye” if the previous clues in the question suggest 1930s’ Germany. NAQT sells frequency list study guides of the works of literature, art, music, and non-fiction, as well as notable people and topics in military history that have come up most frequently since its very first packet set in 1996. The lists include the title of the work, the creator, the genre of the work, and its year of creation. The lists are also available on a subscription basis so you can get updated ones each year at a fraction of the cost of the original. Don’t be afraid to study lists if you think that your team has a shot at greatness; nearly all top-echelon players have done so at some point in their careers. Just don’t allow lists to become the principal focus of your preparation.
The 99 Critical Shots of Quiz Bowl NAQT member Dwight Kidder has written an e-book, The 99 Critical Shots of Quiz Bowl, covering 99 of the most common themes for bonus questions. Reading it should improve both teams’ bonus conversion (by helping them anticipate questions’ contents) and teams’ ability to write quality bonus questions. The book also covers many best practices of team development and coaching. Its Facebook page extends the conversation with weekly articles on topics that are relevant to coaches and players alike.
Notebooks A technique that several players have used with great success is taking a pocket notebook to tournaments and practices. The idea is not to record every single unknown fact for later memorization, but to make a list of answers of which you have never, or only vaguely, heard. After the tournament, you should go through the notebook and look up basic information (an online encyclopedia article, perhaps) about each one so that you will at least know the giveaway clues if the answer comes up again. Even better would be the practice of writing a question or two about each new topic to cement the knowledge. This is more useful than it sounds because once a topic has come up in quiz bowl it is very likely to do so again. Players writing questions for invitational tournaments will tend to write about subjects that they know have been asked before; many are also intrigued by new topics and new ideas and the circulation of tournament questions as practice material ensures that many other players will have heard the same new question as you and been motivated to learn about it as well. And if they learn about it by writing questions, those questions will probably end up being submitted to a tournament. The overall difficulty of the collegiate circuit began to dramatically increase after 1993 when the widespread availability of the Internet made it easier to organize tournaments and purchase practice material; as teams practiced on questions from all over the country, answers that had previously been considered new, or even impossibly difficult, became comparatively commonplace and teams accepted the growth of what was considered “askable” as a fact of the game. A similar phenomenon has taken place at the level of nationals-caliber high school teams. This is good in the sense that players are exposed to a great deal more information and have undoubtedly learned much to stay competitive, but it has also raised the bar for new players and new schools looking to get involved; in 1993 four well-read students from a variety of majors could form a team that expected to win some of its games at its first tournament. In 2003 it’s unlikely that four inexperienced players could take even one match from varsity teams with two years’ experience. Younger teams shouldn’t despair, though; there are plenty of novice tournaments and other events with them in mind and everybody improves with practice. Everything that you ever hear a question on, you will eventually hear another question on, so take the time to learn at least the basic facts behind every answer you encounter.
Current Events A significant element of NAQT play consists of questions about current events, with about 50% of the material pertaining to the United States and 50% to the rest of the world. You can prepare for these by subscribing to—and reading—just about any newspaper, news magazine, or Internet news site. Almost all such questions will be from the past 18 months, with most focusing on the previous six. NAQT emphasizes events of major importance—diplomatic initiatives, economic policies, elections, military actions, natural disasters, scientific discoveries, etc—and will ask relatively few questions about scandals or crimes. It shouldn’t be hard to pick out the major news threads of the past several months and make notes of the people, places, groups, and ideas involved. At the very least, you’ll want to be able to name recent Nobel Prize winners, the current cabinet, leaders of major countries, recent Supreme Court decisions, and prominent senators and governors.
Visual Art Few middle or high schools offer courses on art history and, while many colleges and universities do, not many quiz bowlers elect to make one part of their electives. Nonetheless, NAQT (and nearly every other group of question writers) believes the fine arts to be an important part of a well-rounded education and devote a significant, if small, quota to painting and sculpture. These questions are low-hanging fruit for players willing to expend some time preparing since there are relatively few works of visual art that come up with any regularity, in part because the lack of a standardized curriculum prevents detailed questions about harder works. Looking up those works would be an excellent way to have a good shot at the half-dozen-or-so painting and sculpture tossups per tournament. NAQT favors questions that describe the composition, detail, symbolism, and style of works of art (rather than just asking for their creators), so you’ll want to make sure you can recognize the painting or sculpture from a description.
These are ten ideas that have worked for players in the past and which we recommend to teams interested in taking their game to the next level. We would be very interested in hearing from experienced players about other techniques that have helped them prepare for tournaments.
How-To Guides NAQT has prepared a series of articles about how to accomplish important things in quiz bowl. Read Articles Start a Team NAQT has written guides to starting quiz bowl teams: Middle School High School College
Colonel By Reach & Quizbowl
Note: See this page, this page, and this page on more advice on how to improve.
Note: Please read this page first to understand what I mean when I say “synthesis of knowledge”, “shallow knowledge”, and “deep knowledge”.
For Beginners/Novices
Know your strengths – Category specialization is the way to go for creating teams. It’s usually better to have four specialists who each excel in one category than four average generalists. Once you know what you’re good at, you will know what to focus on. Pay attention in class – Being a good student is the easiest way to become a good Quizbowl player. Quizbowl’s distribution is academic, so you will gain a lot of knowledge from your classes. Go to club practices – Try to come at least once a week (the more, the better!). Make sure to focus hard and pay attention! Go to tournaments – There’s no suitable replacement for actual experience. There is no limit to the number of teams a school can send, so everybody can get involved and attend every tournament. Read packets – However, make sure you are reading a packet of suitable difficulty, such as a novice pack for beginners. Read study lists (see our Links & Resources page) – These are useful if you know absolutely nothing about a topic and need a starting point. Good for beginners, but you will quickly outgrow these as they are considered shallow knowledge. See more about lists under “Final Thoughts” and “On Real and Fake Knowledge“. Surf Wikipedia – It is a great source of general knowledge. Use a notebook – Take notes and you will remember facts! There’s a reason teachers make you do this–it helps A LOT! Make sure to keep it organized. Read books – Books are the #1 source of deep knowledge. I know I sound like an old geezer when I say this, but kids these days simply don’t read enough books. Pay attention to the world around you – Knowledge comes from everywhere. You are immersed in a society blossoming with information at every corner (unless you live under a rock or something). Knowledge can come from anywhere, be it Wikipedia, Sporcle, the news, and other sources wouldn’t expect. Always be seeking knowledge, for it is everywhere.
For Experienced Players
WRITE QUESTIONS – All experienced players should write questions. Not only does it expand your depth of knowledge, many collegiate tournaments require each team to submit a packet. Writing is one of the best ways of obtaining deep knowledge in a subject. In addition, talented and experienced writers earn money from writing and/or editing questions (e.g. house-written tournaments, NAQT, PACE, ACF, etc.) Bonuses, Bonuses, Bonuses – It seems that tossups are much more studied than bonuses. Although studying tossups is obviously useful, studying bonuses is even better for learning more information quickly. This is because they are less verbose, give related answers on the same topic, and therefore allow for easier synthesis of knowledge. DON’T use Protobowl as a method of studying – This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t play Protobowl; it’s lots of fun and you can learn by osmosis. However, it is more of an application of your knowledge; it’s too fast paced to learn much when playing against friends. The other methods on this list are much better practice methods (although admittedly, are not as fun). See more about Protobowl under “Final Thoughts“. Read difficult packets – Always read at a difficulty level higher than what you are accustomed to. You’re not learning as much if you’re constantly getting tossups early on. To know which packets to play, use this guide. Use Quinterest – Not only is the search function useful for writing questions, but its “Study” function is extremely useful for studying. Highly recommended, and not very well-known as it is relatively new. Use a notebook – Every experienced player really should be taking notes by now. Write down all answer lines you hear at practice and at tournaments, in addition to some memorable clues. Read books – At this level, studying lists isn’t going to help. Experienced members often have a wide range of shallow knowledge (e.g. can get tossups at the giveaway clue) but may not necessarily have deep knowledge. I can’t stress enough that the easiest way to gain deep knowledge is through reading books. Synthesis of knowledge is key – Knowledge is not terribly useful unless it can be synthesized together. To acquire this synthesis of knowledge that Quizbowl is all about, always try to acquire deep knowledge (e.g. reading packets or books) rather than shallow knowledge (e.g. study lists, which are only useful as a starting point). Read more about the synthesis of knowledge on this page.
Extra Notes
Study lists are meant ONLY for beginners who require a starting point for their knowledge. There’s nothing wrong with beginners studying lists – in fact, I highly recommend it to new players so they can learn the Quizbowl canon. I understand that Quizbowl has a steep learning curve, and that lists help build a foundation to lessen this slope. Just remember that lists are merely a foundation or starting point.
Always strive towards deep knowledge. That being said, shallow knowledge is not at all bad – it is perfectly normal to acquire shallow knowledge first before acquiring deep knowledge. I consider shallow knowledge as the foundation for my deep knowledge, and a strong foundation is important to build a sturdy house of knowledge. Some people are good at building the house all at once by jumping into deep knowledge right away, but this does not work for everybody. Other people need to build the house one step at a time by gaining shallow knowledge (through lists) first, then deep knowledge (by reading books) afterwards. That being said, a strong foundation is rather unimpressive and frankly, completely useless, if a house of deep knowledge is never built upon it.
Remember, synthesis of knowledge is the reason we play Quizbowl, not blind memorization of facts.
Protobowl, although it is fun, is only a good study method when you are playing by yourself and have the time to take notes. However, reading packets, using Quizbowl DB, or using Quinterest would all be significantly better alternatives.
Final Thoughts
To be honest, you can become a decent player by simply listening in class and attending practices once a week. You can not study and become a decent player, and there’s nothing wrong with being a decent player. However, this guide is for the passionate players that want to be more than just decent. As with anything else you do with your life, the more time and effort you invest, the better you will become. It’s no secret.
Whenever I say “study”, don’t treat it as a negative connotation. Quizbowl should be fun, and if it’s not fun, then perhaps you should rethink your Quizbowl career. Learning through Quizbowl is a very enjoyable and rewarding activity, as learning to love learning will undoubtedly help you in the long-term future. If you don’t like studying but like Quizbowl, then you’ll have to accept that you WILL get crushed into itsy-bitsy pieces by the hard-core teams. Winning is fun; losing is not fun.
In conclusion: If you try hard, you will become a great player. That’s all there is to it.
~ Ted Gan
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If you have other tips on how to become a better Quizbowl player, we’d love to hear them! To provide your useful studying tips, please email Ted Gan.
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