Monday, November 07, 2011

General Lee Speaking (BCQC November 2011 Open Quiz)

Date: 6 Nov 2011

Set and Conducted by: Aditya Gadre

Format:
Teams of 2 for elims. 25 teams participated. 35 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: 21 questions on Infinite Pounce clockwise, 1 5-image Google Doodle written round, 1 7-question non-negative theme, 21 questions on Infinite Pounce anti-clockwise

Results
1st: Team F - Kunal Sawardekar, Maitreyi Gupta and Siddhesh Sarma (draft) - 210225pts
2nd: Team A - J. Ramanand, Niranjan Pedanekar and Yash Sathe (draft)- 125pts
3rd: Team E - Salil Bijur, Chintan Shah and Kamayani Sharma (draft) - 110pts
4th: Team C - Yash Marathe, Aditya Chandorkar and Satyavrat Wagle - 100pts
5th: Team D - Vikram Keskar, Sameer Deshpande and Rohit Sahasrabuddhe (draft) - 90pts
6th: Team B - Venkat Srinivasan, Amit Paranjape (substituted by Arjun Mohan) and Aniketh Rallabhandi (draft) - 35pts

Best College Team: Hitesh Mahato & Finehas Pinto (AFMC)
Best Newbie Team: Prateek Nagras & Rohan Dhamdhere

Prizes sponsored by Landmark and BCQC

Elims cutoff: 11.5

The full set of questions from the prelims and finals are available here, courtesy the QM.

Report (by Ramanand)
* Very simply framed, easy-paced and accessible prelims. Liked it.
* I'm not a fan of Infinite Pounce: I think it complicates the finals, makes it less entertaining for the audience (everyone scribbling away all the time), and elongates the quiz. I'll comment on that separately.
* Time management could have been a little better (it was better in the 2nd half)
* Liked the big connect, though I think the exhaustive-or-not part was confusing (to me)
* Slightly uneven pitch - with some easy ones and some tough ones. Perhaps it would help if the QM further explains the significance of the tough ones to counter the participants' sledging them as being too 'complicated' :)
* Some of the questions could have been less verbose
* What was not at all good was the confusion over scoring. I do think a non-participant should score (or there should be a visible scoring sheet/excel open). It's difficult for teams to keep scores accurately, esp. with Pounce-a-tantra in place.

* <in-joke>BTW, contrary to fears of extinction, some endangered vCats were once again spotted (or was it just the unspotted version? too dry to tell)</in-joke>

Please leave your opinions in the comments section.

5 comments:

Vcat said...

More like an in-in joke!

@QM - good work. And why weren't we considered for the newbie recognition?

J Ramanand said...

VCat:
1. You don't fit the definition of newbie (who is one who has never made a final before - even Amit has, long ago; or is generally a non-quizzer)

2. even if you did fit it, in keeping with our 'socialist policies', we don't give multiple prizes to same teams. e.g. if a college team makes it to the final, 'best college' is given to the next best team not to qualify.

Yash Marathe said...

JR has pretty much covered everything. I'll post my views about Infinite Pounce later as well (expecting a blogpost on this soon from JR).

The elims were probably one of the best I've seen. Very interesting questions, and ultimately quite frustrating for us (as the person who checked our sheet surely knows).

The finals were comparatively a bit of a letdown. Most of the questions were quite good admittedly, but the 'WTF' questions were incredibly 'WTFish' (at least I felt so).

Salil said...

I enjoyed the quiz mostly because me and my teammates had a good time cracking some questions together and that is what matters to me the most. What I realized that there is always place for WTFish questions. For eg. I thought asking for the name of a Serbian film director was WTF but my teammate didn't think so and we could answer it. Vice versa for some others. Diversity of topics is always welcome, and choosing teammates (in my case randomly!) not having similar interests than yours helps!

J Ramanand said...

I object to even calling them "WTF" qns :-) I think QMs should be encouraged to bring in new topics as long as they can bring out why the topic is interesting (or else the audience will naturally think "why is this being asked"). We should be open to newer stuff!

It's also a question of balance of question topics.