Monday, September 26, 2011

Stuff I've Come Across (BCQC September 2011 Open Quiz)

Date: 25 Sep 2011

Set and Conducted by: Vikram Joshi

Format:
Teams of 2 for elims. 32 teams participated. 30 questions written elims on slides.
Top 6 teams in finals. Participants from 7th-9th top teams joint finalist teams randomly. Teams of 3 for finals.
Finals: 30 questions on IR. 1 10-image visual connect. 2nd round of IR with 30 questions in reverse passing order. 'Pick your poison' in 'Infinite Pounce' format where every team selects a topic, other teams can attempt in writing.

Results
1st: Team E - Aditya Gadre, Yash Marathe and Ayon Gupta (draft) - 150pts
2nd: Team C - Vibhendu Tewari, Sarat Rao and Swaminathan (draft)- 120pts
3rd: Team B - Anannya Deb, Anand Sivasankar and Salil Bijur (draft) - 115pts
4th: Team D - J. Ramanand and Suraj Menon - 110pts
5th: Team F - S. Balakrishnan, Sameer Deshpande and Arjun Mohan (draft) - 80pts
6th: Team A - Shubhankar Gokhale, Abhinav Dasgupta and Gaurav (draft) - 50pts

Elims cutoff: 11.5
Best school team: Maitreya Ghorpade and Shreedhar Kale (Symbiosis Secondary School)
Best college team: Abhinav and Suraj
Best newbie team: Arun Warrier and Vignesh J.

Report
Vikram Joshi of the Bombay Quiz Club conducted the second open quiz of the calendar year. This probably helped increase participation from his city. There were also many newcomers including school students.

Team B took an early lead in the first IR round at 70 points with teams C and D at 40. Team E suddenly pulled themselves up by cracking the long visual theme in the 1st set of images. All teams except B answered the theme at the end but B remained at the top. It was the 2nd IR round that saw team D in solid form answering almost everything that came their way. At the end of this round, teams E and D had stolen the lead from B. The Pick your Poison round which had negative marking brought changed the scoring order again, with team E finishing first and C second.

Vikram presented a graph of the distribution of topics the quiz covered: History, Geography, Literature, Sports, Culture, Entertainment and Current Affairs were distributed almost equally. A note on the part points policy: If a question had more than one answer, full points were awarded to only the team that had answered all.

The quiz ended in time with prizes from Landmark being distributed to all finalists.

Landmark, Pune kindly sponsored prizes for the quiz - we thank them for their support.

Please leave your opinions in the comments section.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

looks like they did away with Team A, and started naming from Team Beven if it meant having two teams both called E.

Salil said...

Thanks Anon - the corrections have been made.

Yash Marathe said...

Thought it was an excellent quiz. Most of the questions were quite workable, topics were relevant and interesting, the questions were framed nicely, and the quiz setter had a good idea of how to award part points, and there were an adequate number of audience questions. Everything you expect from a good quiz really. If any newbie quiz setters are reading, I think this quiz should be a good model to follow.

A few minor cribs:
- The finger of god made a couple of unwelcome appearances.
- It was somewhat unfair that one team had to start with a player less due to one of the draft picks leaving.

J Ramanand said...

Great quiz and well conducted (iron hand in iron glove in Answer Nazi pose!)

I thought the sports questions were too easy and if it wasn't the QM's strength, he could have left that subject alone :) (the only tough sports question cost us 15 pts :( )

Sad to see finger of god - I knew the man in black in blackadder even before the clip was played, but alas.

Insufficient incentive on the pounce? You wouldn't know it the way I was buzzing, but 10/-10 on the pounce and 15/0 for the direct seemed a tad skewed.

Overall, very educative and entertaining.

Anand said...

Honestly, I liked the elims more than the finals.
Elims-good mix of social sciences, entertainment. Anannya & I successfully cancelled each other reducing our score by about six..

Finals-interesting pot pourri of topics. Great attempt to keep otherwise-esoteric subjects in the realms of the guessable. Adequate no. of q's.
(-)Haven't done my homework, but felt that there were too many q's esp 2nd half which were cracked by the first team.
Well-anchored.
Would've liked to see more enthu aidience participation in Finals. Sigh !

Anand S

J Ramanand said...

Agree with Anand - there were several 2nd half qns that were gobbled up early.

Audience: would have been good, but since we had a very young-to-quizzing audience, that may have been expected. Vikram needs to be commended for having an adequate no. of audience qns in contrast in some of our previous BCQC quizzes.

Yash Marathe said...

Questions uploaded:

http://bcqc-questions.blogspot.com/2011/09/stuff-ive-come-across.html

Vikster said...

Thanks for the review guys!
1. I agree with the second half being relatively simple - I suppose that was due to the fact that many questions I had on the quiz earlier were asked on Quizzers and other online forums so didn't have much time to make new ones.
2. Sports is my Achilles heel (or my tennis elbow or whatever), I suppose due to that the sports questions were too easy!
3. On the pounce questions, I used typical scoring techniques that I've seen in other quizzes.
4. Finger of God can't be helped with my fat fingers! Still I made up for it with 2 extra questions in the infinite pounce section.

Vikster said...

And YashM, the team with 2 players chose to only have two players when their draft pick left....I did offer a player form the 10th team.