July Open Quiz - Results

Details:
* July BCQC Open Quiz on 9 July, 2006
* Set and conducted by Meghashyam Shirodkar
* Scoring: Infinite Rebounds (10 pts); No Pole Position; Elims winners decide seating order

Results (60 questions in the Final):

1st-C: Shamanth Rao and J. Ramanand (100 pts)
2nd-E: Aadisht Khanna and Raj Kamal (85)
3rd-B: Sayak Dasgupta and Suvojit Chakraborty (80)
4th-A: Rishi Iyengar and Udatta Duarah (75)
Jt 5th-D: Shivaji Marella and Maitreyi Gupta (70)
Jt 5th-F: Niranjan Pedanekar and Gaurav Sabnis (70)

Elims results (30 questions):

1st: Ramanand and Shamanth (21.5)
2nd: Sayak and Suvojit (19)
3rd: Rishi and Udatta (18.5 *)
4th: Raj K and Aadisht (18.5)
5th: Niranjan and Gaurav (18)
6th: Maitreyi and Shivaji (16.5)
Cutoff: 16.5

Comments and Criticisms:

* I didn't like the elims much. Some of the questions like the Jolie, sudoku qns should not have been asked, IMHO. Some of the qns could have been better and more carefully framed. Probably the 1523-Great Britain qn was the best of the lot.
* The finals had too many easy questions shown by the fact that as much as 28 out of 60 qns were answered on the direct.
* Overall, the choice of content was fine, but the framing of questions made it too easy. Some of the questions were extremely huge - I have not seen such end to end slide coverage :-). I have a feeling that workability is sometimes taken to the extreme where too many clues are thrown into the pot. For instance the Empire State Bldg qn: it had enough material to set about 10 qns on the topic. One or two strands could have been picked out to make a smaller and more neater question. A thumb rule could be to keep eliminating clues in a question until the least amount is left which is at the same time still generally workable. It's a tough thing to get right, no doubt
* QM needed to be a little firm during arguments :-) Don't ask the audience for opinions, and if possible, even anticipate such problem areas during setting
* Now for some positives: this is probably Meghashyam's 2nd or 3rd quiz ever, so for a beginner, the quiz was pretty decent. There were no hitches in presentation etc.
* The questions on "first lines...Win 95 removal", "chote sarkar-sorry", the 1st qn on tennis, the ship MV..., etc were very good. Some of the other choices in questions were decent, but made too easy by framing, or were such that there were only few options to guess, what Niranjan calls "survivability" of a question was low in most qns
* At the risk of sounding like Rahul Dravid, these open quizzes are also an opportunity for newer people to have the experience of setting questions and organising quizzes. We have had at least 3 debuts in the last 8 quizzes, and the results have been encouraging.

And...:

* Thanks to Meghashyam for the prizes :-)
* Thanks to the participants, from Mumbai and the locals, for braving the slightly inclement political weather and turning up !
* I wonder why no one thought of the team name "conceived on the fourth of October" considering the subtitle of the quiz
* We may have a vacant slot for September, so if anyone's interested in holding a quiz then, please let me know and I'll see if it becomes possible. Samrat will do the quiz in November.

As usual, please leave comments on this post if you have anything to say about yesterday's quiz.