Quiz bowl

History[edit]
Most forms of modern quiz bowl are modeled after game shows.[3] College Bowl, which was
created by Don Reid as a USO activity for US service men during World War II, was an influential
early quiz bowl program.[4][5] Also known as "The College Quiz Bowl," it started on radio in 1953
and then aired on national television from 1959 to 1970. [6]
In the first half of the 20th century, many other quiz bowl-like competitions were also
created. Delco Hi-Q began in 1948 as a radio quiz competition sponsored by the Scott Paper
Company for high school students in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. It claims to be the oldest
continuously running student quiz contest in the United States. [7] The It's
Academic televised student quiz show program has been run for high school teams in
the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area since 1961 and is recognized by the Guinness Book of
World Records as the longest-running quiz program in television history. [8] It's Academic has
been spun off in many other US media markets and has inspired many other televised high
school competitions.[8]
In 1977, College Bowl was revived as an activity on college campuses by College Bowl
Company Inc. (CBCI).[9] In September 1990, the Academic Competition Federation (ACF) was
founded as the first major alternative to The College Bowl Company. [10] National Academic Quiz
Tournaments (NAQT) was founded in 1996 and currently organizes national competitions at all
levels in the United States and supplies tournament questions for grade school and college
teams across North America and other parts of the world. [11][12] In 2008, the College Bowl program
abruptly ended, although the company itself continues to operate the Honda Campus All-Star
Challenge (HCASC) for historically black colleges and universities.[13]

Gameplay[edit]

A quiz bowl game at the University of Delaware

During a quiz bowl game, two or more teams of usually up to four or five players are read
questions by a moderator.[1][14] In most forms of quiz bowl, there are two basic types of questions:
toss-ups and bonuses.[1] Toss-ups are questions that any individual player can attempt to answer,
and players are generally not allowed to confer with each other. [2] Conferring with your team
usually results in a deduction of 5 points. Each player usually has a signaling device, also called
a buzzer, to signal in at any time during the question to give an answer. [12] If the answer given is
incorrect, then no other member of that team may give an answer. If a toss-up is successfully
answered, the correctly answering team is given an opportunity to answer a bonus. [1][14][15] Bonuses
are usually worth a total of 30 points, and consist of three individual questions worth ten points
each.[2] Team members are generally permitted to confer with each other on these questions. [1][2][16]
Regional or local tournaments may dispose of any number of standard rules entirely. [2] Some may
only have toss-ups and not use bonuses at all.[17] Some formats include a lightning round during
which a team attempts to answer multiple questions as fast as possible under a given time limit,
usually sixty seconds.[18][19]
Match length is determined by either a game clock or the number of questions in a packet. [2][16] In
most formats, a game ends once the moderator has finished reading every question in a packet.
  Tie-breaking procedures may include reading extra toss-ups until the tie is broken or sudden-
[2]

death toss-ups.[2][16]
Quiz bowl tests players in a variety of academic subjects including literature, science, history,
and fine arts.[20] Additionally, some quiz bowl events may feature small amounts of popular
culture content like sports, popular music, and other non-academic general knowledge subjects,
although their inclusion is generally kept to a minimum. [21][22]
In most quiz bowl competitions, players and coaches may protest the moderator's decision if they
believe their answer was incorrectly rejected, or an opponent's answer was incorrectly accepted.
[2]
 Invalid protests or unnecessary protest can result in additional negs and an expulsion from the
game.

Toss-ups[edit]
A pyramidal tossup on trumpets
This instrument plays the opening Promenade in Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, as well as the rising theme C-G-C in
the opening of Richard Strauss' Thus Spake Zarathustra. This instrument's tone can be lowered by one-and-a-half steps by
pressing either its third or both its first and second (*) valves. For 10 points, name this brass instrument whose timbre is slightly
brighter than that of a cornet.
ANSWER: 'trumpet's

2013 CMST

Two common types of toss-ups include buzzer-beaters and pyramidal tossups. Buzzer-beaters
(also known as speed check or quick-recall questions) are relatively short, rarely more than two
sentences long, and contain few clues.[23][24] This type of question is written specifically to test
quick recall skills of players, and does not discriminate the different levels of knowledge that the
players possess.[1] These Buzzer-Beaters are not included in major state or national tournaments.
Pyramidal or pyramid-style tossups include multiple clues and are written so that each question
starts with more difficult clues and moves toward easier clues. [1] This way the player with the
most knowledge of the subject being asked about has the most opportunity to answer first. [25][26]
[27]
 Pyramidal toss-ups are considered standard for college quiz bowl. [14][25]
In most formats, correctly answering a toss-up earns a team 10 points. [15] Extra points, usually for
a total of 15 or 20 points, may be awarded if a question is answered prior to a certain clue-
providing keyword in the question, an action known as "powering." [12] Answering a tossup
incorrectly is called "negging" and may incur a 5-point penalty for a team. [16] After a neg occurs,
the moderator continues reading the rest of the question for the other team. [16] There are usually
no further penalties after one team has already negged. [2]

Bonuses[edit]
A bonus question on amino acids
These biological monomers are usually in a zwitterionic form. For 10 points each:

[10] Name this class of molecules that make up proteins, examples of which include tryptophan, alanine, and lysine.
ANSWER: amino acids
[10] During translation, amino acids are polymerized by these complexes, which are formed in the nucleolus.
ANSWER: ribosomes
[10] Some proteins can become infectious agents. This is the name of those misfolded proteins that are responsible for mad
cow disease and Kuru.
ANSWER: prions

2011 Collegiate Novice

Bonuses usually have multiple parts that are related by some common thread and may or may
not be related to corresponding tossup. A team is usually rewarded with 10 points upon correctly
answering each bonus part. Bonuses are the only types of questions where you can confer with
your team. Usually, only the team that answered the tossup correctly can answer the bonus
questions, though some formats allow the opposing team to answer certain parts of the bonus
not correctly answered by the team in control of the bonus, a gameplay element known as a
"bounceback" or "rebound."[2] Less-used types of bonus questions include list bonuses, which
require players to give their answers from a requested list, and "30-20-10" bonuses, which give a
number of discrete clues for a single answer in order of decreasing difficulty, with more points
being awarded for giving the correct answer on an earlier clue. The 30-20-10 bonus was officially
banned from ACF in 2008[28] and NAQT in 2009.[29]

Variations[edit]
Several variations on the game of quiz bowl exist that affect question structure and content, rules
of play, and round format.[2] One standardized format is the pyramidal tossup/bonus format, which
is used in NAQT and ACF (or mACF, referring to question sets produced in a similar style to
those of ACF) competitions.[2][30]
Many quiz bowl question producers, including ACF and NAQT, publish a distribution of the
number of tossups and bonuses per round that will feature material from a given area of study. [31]
[32][33]

ACF/mACF tossups are written in pyramidal style and are generally much longer than College
Bowl and NAQT questions. Games are usually untimed and last until a total of 20 tossups are
read.[12] The published distribution of ACF quiz bowl emphasizes academic subjects, with very
little popular culture.[12][34]
NAQT is another common variation on the tossup/bonus format that balances academic rigor
with a wider variety of subjects, including popular culture and an increased amount of current
events and geography content.[12][20] Unlike many mACF events, most questions used in this
format are written and sold by NAQT themselves.[35] NAQT also uses powers in their tossups,
which reward players with 15 points instead of 10 for a tossup answered before a predetermined
point.[16] Games played on NAQT rules consist of two nine-minute halves and a total of 24
tossups.[2][36] NAQT tossups are typically shorter than most other pyramidal tossups because of a
character limit enforced on the questions.[37] The format used for the now-defunct College Bowl
tournament uses comparatively shorter questions. [12] Gameplay is relatively quick as it is played in
eight-minute halves, to a usual total of 22–24 tossups read. [38]
The Honda Campus All Star Challenge and University Challenge use similar formats.[39][40][41]
Matches played at the National Academic Championship and its affiliated tournaments are split
into four quarters, with differing styles of gameplay in each phase. [24] Individual tournaments may
use worksheet quizzes, lightning rounds, or tossups without accompanying bonuses. [42]

Preparation[edit]
Since questions are generally derived from an unofficial canon of topics, players commonly
review question content from older competitions to prepare for upcoming tournaments. [43][44]
[45]
 Several websites exist in this vein, the most commonly used being QuizDB, a navigable
database of past quiz bowl tournaments; Protobowl, a multiplayer real-time quiz bowl simulator;
and QuizBug 2, a single-player quiz bowl simulator. [46][47][48] NAQT also makes monthly free articles
titled "You Gotta Know" on different topics that commonly occur in tournaments.
Players also research and write questions to prepare for quiz bowl. Active participation in
academic coursework can also serve as means of preparing for quiz bowl. [49] Blind memorization
of high-frequency out-of-context facts, often referred to as "stock" clues, is a common method of
quiz bowl preparation, but is generally discouraged for the lack of academic utility in doing so. [44]
[50]
 Team members often specialize in a few subjects.[51] Players benefit from exposure to a broad
range of school and cultural subjects, memorization, and study skills, and an improved ability to
cooperate and work in teams.[51][52]
NAQT also sells lists of topics that are frequently asked about in their questions. [53]

Competitions[edit]
Quiz bowl is primarily played at single-day tournaments. [1] Some events have eligibility rules that
dictate who may participate, such as allowing only freshman and sophomore players or excluding
graduate students from playing. [54] Additionally, most tournaments allow multiple teams from a
single school to compete.
Some schools hold intramural tournaments where any team formed from students can play.
[55]
 High school-level quiz bowl is occasionally played over an extended period of time by schools
within an area or preexisting athletic conference or even in single matches against other schools.
[49]

Some regional variants organized for grade school students include Knowledge

Bowl, Ohio Academic Competition (OAC), Florida's Commissioner's Academic Challenge (CAC),
and various television quiz competitions such as It's Academic.[49] Athletic and activities
associations in some US states also organize quiz bowl competitions, including
Missouri's MSHSAA, Illinois's IHSA, Kansas's KSHSAA, and Virginia's VHSL.[49][56]
Additionally, various formats have been developed to test knowledge in specific areas like
the Bible,[57] classics,[58] science,[59] and agricultural science.[60] DECA runs quiz bowl events at their
competitions that tests knowledge on business and market topics.[61] Gallaudet
University sponsors a National Academic Bowl for deaf university students. [62] Tournaments
designated as "trash" focus on pop culture and sports trivia questions.[12]

National tournaments[edit]
There are several collegiate-level national championship tournaments for which teams usually
qualify through regional competitions. They include:

 NAQT's Intercollegiate Championship Tournament (ICT)

 NAQT's Community College Championship Tournament (CCCT)
 ACF Nationals
 Honda Campus All-Star Challenge (HCASC)
Several national competitions are conducted in the United States every year for high school
students. Compared to the college level, there are usually more tournaments at which teams can
qualify.[63][64] National tournaments include:

 NAQT's High School National Championship Tournament (HSNCT)

 Partnership for Academic Competition Excellence's National Scholastic Championship
(PACE NSC)
 The National Academic Association and Question Unlimited's National Academic
Championship (NAC)
 JROTC Leadership and Academic Bowl (JLAB)
The following high school tournaments are for single all-star teams from each US state or other
political subdivision:

 National All-Star Academic Tournament  (NASAT)

 National Tournament of Academic Excellence (NTAE) (formerly known as the Panasonic
Academic Challenge)
Beginning in 2018, NAQT has organized the Individual Player National Championship
Tournament (IPNCT).[65] Since 2019, IPNCT has been separated into high school and middle
school divisions.[65]

Educational value[edit]
Some proponents of reform seek to increase the educational value and fairness of quiz bowl,
primarily by using pyramidal questions.[45][66] Many competitions at grade school levels are
criticized for their use of speed-check questions, which encourage participants to rely more on
their ability to buzz in quickly than on knowledge of the subjects tested. [45] Some tournaments
such as College Bowl are criticized for being insufficiently academic, including superfluous clues
in their questions, and for recycling questions from previous years. [3][12] The use of "hoses,"
misleading clues that discourage players from buzzing in too early, is also considered a mark of
"bad" quiz bowl.[12][45] The use of mathematical computation problems in tossups is criticized by
some for rewarding fast problem solving skills over conceptual knowledge and being non-
pyramidal.[67] Pyramidal questions are sometimes criticized for containing obscure information and
being unsuitable for television.[3][68]

Broadcasting[edit]
Further information: List of televised academic student quiz programs

Quiz bowl shows have been on television for many decades in some areas and usually feature
competitors from local high schools.[69] Many of these competitions may have rules and formats
that differ slightly from standardized quiz bowl.[70][71]
College Bowl was broadcast on NBC radio from 1953 to 1955. The program moved to television
as General Electric College Bowl and was broadcast from 1959 to 1970, first on CBS and later
on NBC. College Bowl would return to CBS radio from 1979 to 1982, and HCASC was broadcast
on BET from 1990 to 1995. The Texaco Star National Academic Championship ran from 1989 to
1991 on Discovery Channel and was hosted by Chip Beall and Mark L. Walberg.[72][73] In 1994, it
was syndicated as the Star Challenge and hosted by Mark L. Walberg.[citation needed] University
Challenge is licensed from CBCI by Granada TV Ltd. and broadcast in the United
Kingdom. Reach for the Top, a Canadian competition with a quiz bowl-like format, has been
broadcast on the CBC in the past.

Game show contestants[edit]

Quiz bowl has received media coverage due to the number of highly successful game show
contestants with backgrounds in the activity.[74][75] NAQT maintains a list of current and former quiz
bowl players at any level who have appeared on TV game shows. [76] Several of the top dollar
winners in the history of Jeopardy! include former players such as Ken Jennings,[12][77] Matt
Jackson, David Madden,[78] and Brad Rutter.[79] Such is the correlation between success
on Jeopardy! and quiz bowl experience that Jennings described the competition as a "minor
league" for the show and other televised quiz show competitions. [80]