Thursday, April 09, 2009

BCQC April Evening Open Quiz

Set and Conducted by Aniket Khasgiwale & Meghashyam Shirodkar.

Results:
1st: Rajiv Rai, Sumant Srivathsan, Yash Tamaskar (draft) [A]: 145 pts
2nd: Atul Matthew, Abhinav, Suraj Menon (draft) [B]: 105 pts
3rd: Suvajit C, J. Ramanand, Harish Kumar (draft) [E]: 80 pts
Jt. 4th: Anand Sivashankar, Aditya Gadre, Devang Ghia (draft) [F]: 55 pts
Jt. 4th: Amit Varma, Anannya Deb, Niranjan Pedanekar (draft) [C]: 55 pts
6th: Vibhendu Tiwari, Sarat Rao, Ajith Prabhakar :45 pts

Elims: highest: Rajiv+Sumant (22/35); cutoff: 15
Participating Teams: about 40

I was quite disappointed with the (short) quiz and will struggle to think of redeeming features. Perhaps someone can comment about the silver linings. Until then, the clouds:
* Elims were ok, but many questions suffered from being vague in communicating what was expected. This caused problems during correction later. Crisp answers & minimum ambiguity are necessary, especially when people apart from the QMs are correcting.
* More than average number of cricket qns
* A couple of qns in the finals (like the Gulzar) were just bad
* Powerpoint excesses once again, as we groaned again and again about the size of the text in the question. Will lead me to believe they were pasted from a web source, so avoidable, IMO.
* Once again, a case of QMs making questions till the last minute and hence not being able to present a crisp and pleasant interface?

Ok, there were a couple of very nice questions in the finals, which provoked good answers by some of the finalists. The winners led comfortably through out the quiz, and team 2 did very well to come back. But in all, I found the quiz rather uninspiring, and I almost found myself thinking of other things I could have been doing. Wish that were not so.

15 comments:

SURAJ said...

i think ramanands pretty much covered everything...one crib was the length of the quiz....too short too give teams a chance to come back sorta and the elims were a bit esoteric!!!!!!!!!!!!

Anonymous said...

can i conduct next bcqc open quiz?

Niranjan said...

No, especially if you are anonymous.

Shamanth said...

Why? Anonymous quizmasters are people too! :p

Yash Marathe said...

That claim needs more evidence :P

Amit Dandekar said...

Actually a good point suggested by "Mr. Anonymous" which triggered an opposite idea in my head. Why doesn't the bcqc members conduct a quiz for non-bcqc regulars (like anon)?? I think next bcqc open quiz should be for non-bcqc ppl! Everytime there are same teams on the stage. Why not something different??

Amit Dandekar said...

This one is free of grammatical errors:-)
Actually a good point suggested by "Mr. Anonymous" which triggered an opposite idea in my head. Why don't the bcqc members conduct a quiz for non-bcqc regulars (like anon)?? I think next bcqc open quiz should be for non-bcqc ppl! Everytime there are same ppl on the stage. Why not something different??

Yash Marathe said...

How would you define a BCQC regular or a non-BCQC regular?? Would quizzers from Bombay fall into the former category?? They don't attend BCQC sessions. Do Harish and Niranjan count?? These days, due to other commitments, they are BCQC irregulars. We could arrange a quiz just for college students or a newbie quiz, but we would need more than 9-10 teams participating. I think there are more than enough decent college quizzes in and around Pune which the "BCQC regulars" cannot participate in.

Yash said...

Amit, please elaborate on how to conduct a quiz for non-bcqc people!?
And its not that bad. I never used to get on the stage till last year.
Obviously every quiz is biased towards people who are good :)

J Ramanand said...

The "Yash, we can!"s can give Amit D a break! I'm sure his comment is half in jest.

Amit: hopefully, the fact that some of the quizzes have the 'draft pick' allows newer faces on stage from time to time. And there are always BC sessions for all.

Oh, and since there is no concept of a 'bcqc' membership, anyone who comes for such quizzes can be considered to be a member. So you are one, like it or not :-)

Anonymous: you can do the quiz if you wear an iron mask or a Guy Fawkes mask through the entire quiz.

Yash said...

Or better. Hannibal's mask. With the straight jacket :)

Amit Dandekar said...

Solution to everything... Let me conduct the next bcqc open!! What is the criteria to be fulfilled to be able to conduct bcqc open??
P.S. This is not at all "half in jest!"

(Foot in mouth????... @moderators- Pl pl dont block me from posting here! and "please" provide an option to delete ur own comments so that later on when i repent my random blabberings i can conveniently delete them!!)

J Ramanand said...

(We have a pro-foot-in-mouth policy, so fire away, if you can.)

There is a bit of a waiting list right now, so perhaps we can slot you in later this year.

There is no stringent criteria, apart from that you should be able to do a quiz that is largely interesting, steers clears of the usual pitfalls, and does not result in people thinking they have wasted their time in attending it. It would be preferable for you to do some quizzes at the BC, or co-organise less intensive quizzes such as school quizzes etc. to give us (once who haven't seen your college quizzes) the confidence that you can pull a BCQC quiz off. That will also enable us to give you feedback before you go before the pack of vultures that are quizzing audiences.

Yash Marathe said...

I suggest you do a couple of sessions first, as Ramanand said. And there's the school quiz that will probably be held in July/August. I'm probably going to be busy then, and Maitreyi is leaving for France.

Amit Dandekar said...

Absolutely. I also don't expect myself to be on stage out of the blue conducting a bcqc open!! But I would be very much interested in contributing to school quiz!! Sometime I'll probably drop by at bc.