The Quiz at BJ Medical College, Vedant

Venue: Mahatma Gandhi Auditorium, BJ Medical College, Pune.

Winners: Siddharth Dani & Salil Bijur (VIT) - Team F

Runners Up: (AFMC) - Team E

3rd Place: Kunal Sawardekar & Ulka Athale (FC) - Team C

4th Place: Sanket Anekar & Aditya Chandorkar (FC) - Team A

5th Place: Vivek Venkatraman + 1 (BJMC) - Team D

6th Place: Kunal Thakar & Ganesh Hegde (VIT) - Team B

Remarks:

- The Quizmaster, perhaps because of his not having been to too many quizzes, completely underestimated the level of the quizzers attending his quiz. Out of a total of 30 Elims questions, the cutoff was 24 with all stars. This same lack of faith in the participants manifested itself in the finals.

- The Khashaba Jadhav question featured in the Elims yet again.

- There were some very weird rounds. One was the RIM round, where all questions were based on their sponsors, Reliance India Mobile (eg, "What is the full form of CDMA?"). Another round involved choosing to answer either an easy or a difficult question. The difficult questions were marked +30-10, while the easy ones were a flat +10. The criteria for classification as either easy or difficult were however skewed, to put it mildly.

- The Quizmaster was one of that dying breed of quizzers who obstinately refuse to adopt Infinite Rebounds. The scoring system in place here was D&P 10+5.

- The last round was a Speed Round with 12 questions per team. Astonishingly for a 10+5 quiz, each Speed Round question carried 10 points. This obviously changed the course of the quiz completely, with some teams making spectacular gains and others falling behind.

- There were some nice, difficult, workable questions, which somehow all appeared in our Speed Round and totally sunk us.

- The audience was restive, and at times rowdy, perhaps because very few questions escaped the teams to pass on to them. The two audience prizes that were awarded were presented in style, with a member of the faculty being called to give them to the lucky winners up on stage.

- All in all, the quiz was an honest effort that somehow fell short of our expectations for such a big quiz. The Quizmaster was a decent chap, who just messed up in what was probably his first college quiz.

Analysis:

Team A: 3D, 1P, 7NA, (+30+0), 70SR = 135 Total.

Team B: 5D, 1P, 6NA, (-10-10), 90SR = 125 Total

Team C: 5D, 4P, 4NA, (+30+10), 50SR = 160 Total

Team D: 2D, 0P, 10NA, (-10+30), 90SR = 130 Total

Team E: 3D, 2P, 6NA, (-10+30), 120SR = 180 Total

Team F: 6D, 2P, 6NA, (-10+30), 100SR = 190 Total.

(D = Direct Qns Answered, P = Passed Qns Answered, NA = Not Answered, SR = Speed Round score, Parenthesis indicate Difficult/Easy round score)