Qonnoisseur- The MELA Quiz at MindSpark : Report

Qonnoisseur- The MELA Quiz at COEP's MindSpark 2012

Conducted by Rohan Danait

1st: Swapnil and Akib: 150 pts
2nd: Kunal sawardekar and Avaneendra Bhargav: 115 pts
3rd: Aditya Gadre and Annanya Deb: 105 pts
4th: Ranajeet Soman and Rohan jain: 95 pts
5th: Ravi and Rohit: 75 pts
6th: Debanjan Bose and Hari Nair: 65 pts

Positives:

- The quiz was a huge contrast from Chakravyuh the previous day - the effort in setting the quiz was apparent.
- The quiz started off with a nice elims set - a few questions could have been better framed but overall a good effort.
- The elims were engaging and well conducted - a big thumbs up for a lot of visual content as well
- The finals had quite a few nice questions - and most questions were well framed
- The ppt was well thought out - everything we needed was on the slides
- The caricatures round was really nice
- Overall the quiz was light and interesting - most teams seemed to like it.

Negatives:

- After reminders and announcements that the quiz has been advanced to 10am, it started at 11 am anyway.
- The quiz (elims + finals) was a bit of a disappointment on the balance front as it turned out to be very Hollywood heavy. Very few questions on music, other entertainment, TV or arts. Nearly nothing at all on India.
- Lack of AV content in the finals
- Some peters here and there - could have been avoided by getting the questions reviewed by resident EntGawds
- Content-wise my only major issue with the quiz was the theme - the connection was extremely loose and possibly even worse lexical. In general "movies of XYZ" make for horrible themes, and this was one. The QM could have explored so much more in a quiz on Music, Entertainment, Literature and Arts - and it saddens me that the theme was also a Hollywood based theme.
- The theme like Chakravyuh was ridiculously high on weightage in terms of points (60!) thus favouring Gary Oldman like crazy. Themes should never have more than 2-3 questions weightage IMO.

The quiz turned out to be quite close with all teams at almost identical scores at the halfway mark - three teams (Swapnil & Akib, Rohan & Ranajeet and us) pulled away in the second half only. Before going into the theme, we were leading, R&R were second. S&A and K&A leapfrogged us on the theme round to take 1st and 2nd respectively.