Wednesday, February 11, 2004

Comments on Formats of Rounds - I

Pulling out significant comments to the earlier post into the open. Salil has this to say :

Some Thoughts on Infinite Rebounds:-

Having participated in many inter-school quizzes where the Direct & Passing system is rampant, Infinite Rebounds (IR) was a pleasant surprise when I started participating in college-level quizzes.

One of the pecularity of IR is the freedom of points reserved for each question (unlike the D&P where its 10-5) where there can be multi-answer questions of 15 points, etc.
At a certain quiz I went to, there was this question: Complete the famous Janata Party slogan of the Emergency time: Nasbandi ke teen dalal - _______, __________, __________. The quizmaster (QM) fairly declared 15 points for the whole answer : 5 for each blank. Though we knew the answer : Indira, Sanjay, Bansi Lal; we were at position 5. Unfortunately for us, 3 teams had already provided one name each winning 5 points apiece, before the question came to us.

However we could not protest because we had built our score mostly on partial points from similar questions.

So the question is: Should the QM award the teams partial points at each correct answer? This would be very unfair for the team which knows the complete answer. Or should the QM wait till all answers are obtained from the teams? This would deny points to teams that could answer atleast one of the 3 blanks. It would also decrease workability based on answers of other teams which often makes the quiz more exciting.

Thanks Salil. Will have a response after penning my thoughts on Infinite Rebounds. Would be interested in knowing what others think about this - this is a very common occurence.

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