Saturday, January 31, 2009

Quiz O Mania '09 at VIT

Set and conducted by : Yash Marathe and Maitreyi Gupta

Format : 25 questions elims on ppt followed by 60 questions on seamless IR 10 of which constituted a theme.

Results:
1st : Aniket Khasgiwale and Aditya Gadre : 170 pts
2nd : Salil Bijur and Suraj Menon : 135 pts
3rd : Niranjan Pednekar and Yasho Tamaskar : 115 pts
4th : Dr. Chandorkar and Aditya Chandorkar : 95 pts
5th : Amit Dandekar and Yash Sinha : 40 pts
6th : Rahul and Ashok : 20 pts

Positives:
- Some really good , workable questions
- Good organisation. No major problems , long waiting periods or other events encroaching on the Quiz (like JAM did last year)
- Reasonably clear policy on part points
- The finger of God didn't show itself.
- Nice accessible theme . Another positive about the theme was that it didn't carry too much weightage and thus didn't affect the outcome of the quiz in any way.
- Prize money and certificates available very easily.

Cribs:
- Elims were very simple and had just 25 questions. Last years elims were brilliant . This time they could have been much better.
- Quite a lot of sitters/peters.
- Slightly uneven distribution of questions both in number and in quality.(For eg: The language questions were very good whereas the sports questions were all very easy for an open quiz)

Overall the quiz was well organised , conducted in a very competent manner and most importantly a lot of fun .

Do leave your opinions in the comments section.

11 comments:

J Ramanand said...

congratulations to
- the winners
- the finalists (some new names!)
- the quiz masters
- and the prompt reporter :-)

Anonymous said...

Hey aditya, thanks for the prompt report.

Rohit Khaladkar had also contributed questions.

We had kept the elims simple to keep it audience friendly, and many of them did stick around to see the finals.

Since Quiz o mania is an open quiz conducted by collegians, it makes it difficult for the quizmasters to make both the quizzer community and the junta happy simultaneously. Perhaps the biggest challenge for us was to strike that balance.

This year I wasn't an organiser of Epiphany so I could dedicate more time to Quiz o mania

The BCQC guys would have qualified whatever the level of difficulty of the elims. But if the elims are easy, at least the other participants feel a little happy.

Notes:

1)We managed to start the event at the scheduled time.
2)We used the same format for the elim sheets as we had used in the last school quiz. So the answers had to be short - 1 or 2 words.
3)Sadly, we could not manage to use the plasma tv on the stage. A stage finals would have been more fun
4)We had decided to reveal which questions were theme questions only after the answers were discussed so that the teams who got the theme connect early had no advantage. But it was great to see Niranjan and Yasho crack the theme after the first 2 questions.
5)Sorry about the sitters and peters.
6)The LCD projector in the auditorium was too bright which ruined the fun of some of the picture questions, esp the black and white pics. Luckily, we didn't have to scrap any questions because of that.
This is something that happens at PSPL audi as well.
7) Thanks to the epiphany organisers for the prompt cheques and certificates.

Aditya, didn't understand what you meant by "Slightly uneven distribution of questions in number", but as always, the quiz did reflect the interests of the quizmasters and yes, some topics were probably neglected.

Congrats to the winners.

Thanks to our honorary VITian, Yash Marathe.

I will upload the questions on inquizitive

Aditya said...

What I meant was that some topics weren't covered at all. There was nothing on Indian politics /films and in general very few India questions. Of course this helped us greatly and largely contributed to our win , but looking at the quiz objectively there probably should have been a few more topics covered.
Simple elims are no issue , but if the elims are simple then they should be long . 25 questions is too short an elim to get the 6 final teams. If I recall correctly , there were about 4-5 teams which missed qualification by just a couple of points. when you have a long , easy elims there is generally a clear demarcation between the good and not-so-good teams.

Anonymous said...

Thanks to the organizers for the quiz, though we missed out on prize money :(

Most of the stuff covered in the earlier comments.

I surmise the sitters/peters, uneven distribution of hardness and topics was an indication of not enough time given to the quiz setting. In my limited experience, better quiz in these respects normally takes 3-6 months to craft.

Also, special thanks to Yash for accepting the correct parts of the answers from me in great haste (e.g. "evita") rather than paying heed to the comments followed by his namesake (e.g. "her portrait, or maybe statue or something" ;))

J Ramanand said...

> though we missed out on prize money :(

Why was this quiz only 'winner-and-runner up-take it all' ? A blow struck against quizzing socialism :-)

Would be interesting to know if the QMs have any theories on why some questions turned out to be sitters or repeats.

Anonymous said...

Well honestly I had wanted 3 prizes (at least) and had asked the organizers to do that. They said that the cheques had already been made so it was not possible to change it. The 2-prizes only was an Epiphany policy. My apologies to Yasho and Niranjan.

Niranjan, thanks for being a good sport - lots of people told me that they appreciated your witty comments during the quiz.

Btw I remember Salil shouting shouting, "This is a theme question, this is a theme question!" before the answer for that particular question was announced. Don't help other teams, Salil! :)

The cut off for the finals was 15 with 3 stars. The next team was 14 with 3 stars (Gaurav Singh and Chinmay Nivargi) and there were a couple of teams in the 10-12 range. (all BCQC people) In retrospect, the elims were easy for a quizzer but not for the aam junta.

We were aware of the uneven spread of topics for a long time, but somehow between Yash and me (and Rohit) we didn't come up with any good India-related questions. Even the India questions that were there were also connected to other countries.
Won't elaborate further on this.

Uneven distribution of hardness of questions - well honestly, we tried the questions on each other and many of them seemed too tough and obscure, especially to me! So we were more worried about making the questions too tough and we had a lot of hints prepared, although we never had to use them.

But I had purposely dumbed down the questions this year. Even so, many college people apparently thought the quiz was boring. (I really wonder what they find interesting then).

I think that next years' organisers should consider making quizomania a college level event. I'm just glad that I didn't have to take that decision. :-p

I personally have been setting questions for around 6 months, although I ended up not using a lot of those questions. I will perhaps conduct a BC session with the left-overs as this is the last big quiz I will be organising, in college or elsewhere.

Yash Marathe said...

I apologize for the "easiness" of the sports questions. They would have made pretty good questions for non-sports quizzers, especially with less hints.

As for India questions, well, it was a better effort than last year (at least the theme connected to India :p).

As for the Evita question, my general policy is that as long as the contestant has got the gist of what I need, it's good enough.

And it was Suraj who started jumping up and down shouting "Theme question", not Salil.

Salil said...

Actually, it was our ploy to confuse the others by shouting "Theme question!" when it wasnt (double-cross) or even when it was (double-double-cross).

SURAJ said...

ah well.....it might have been a lil unjust to jump up and down and shout theme question theme question .....im not eligible for any fairplay awards.... and we wouldnt normally do it but we had a gadhav sitting behind us that kinda brought out the worst in me....... so a thousand apologies to the organisers... other than that it was a good quiz and we had loads of fun.....

ps I'M TIRED OF OTHER TEAMS MORE TIME ON PASSES JUST COS IM FROM MANIPAL ( PROCEEDS TO KICK IMAGINARY DUSTBIN) :p

SURAJ said...

I'M TIRED OF OTHER TEAMS GETTING MORE TIME ON PASSES JUST COS IM FROM MANIPAL IS WHAT I MEANT
(PROCEEDS TO KICK IMAGINARY DUSTBIN) :p

Anonymous said...

Salil and Suraj, forgiven for the double-double bluff but only because the gaadhav factor was involved.

And yes, Suraj, as a matter of principle we give less time to people from manipal. Will make it a point to mention it in the rules of the quiz next time ;)