academic buzzer team

resources

The Quizbowl Resource Center Forums: Lots of people who play quizbowl use these forums to talk to each other about their opinions on college and high school quizbowl. You can view and participate in lots of discussion about the finer points of the game, ask questions of people, and look at announcements for upcoming tournaments here. A couple of caveats apply: first, remember that discussion on this forum corresponds to a real life activity — it’s very likely that you’ll see these people at tournaments. Second, remember that no one on these forums speaks for everyone.

The Stanford Culture Pages: These pages can give you a pretty general idea about the sort of things that are likely to come up, and they provide you with the most well-known information about those topics. It can be a good way to get broad and shallow information about a topic you know little about, but other methods of improvement are likely to get you better faster.
Question Databases: The ACF Database, the Quizbowl Question Database, the Stanford Packet Archive, the College Quizbowl Packet Archive, and goodpackets.zip all offer archives of old tournaments’ questions. A great way to get better at quizbowl (arguably the best way) is to look at old questions — it’ll give you a good sense of what types of things are likely to come up, so you can look at what you want to read more about. Also, the clues chosen for questions are often important academic facts about the answers, so remembering them will often help you get questions in the future.

Jerry Vinokurov’s Question-Writing Guide: An important part of playing college quizbowl is the act of writing questions. Often, tournaments require us to submit a packet of questions which are edited by a central editor and read during our bye round. Writing questions is also perhaps the best way to get better at quizbowl, along with hearing and reading questions, because it requires you to do extensive research and to identify which facts about a topic are important enough to merit inclusion as a clue. Learning to write questions well is a process that takes practice, but reading this guide will give you a good basis from which to start.

ACF
NAQT: These are the two main formats that we play in college. Most tournaments are a variation on ACF, while NAQT runs a sectional tournament and a national tournament.