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Reed's Spring Tournament 3/3

Tournament announcements, results, and discussion about specific tournaments.
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ryan
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Location: ozark

Reed's Spring Tournament 3/3

Post by ryan »

Varsity

1.Ozark
2.Willard A
3.Lebanon
4.Kickapoo

JV
1.Nixa
2.Ozark

I'm pretty sure this tournament used the worst questions ever written. How someone could write questions so poorly is beyond me.

I feel sorry for Reed's Spring's coach who somehow got duped into paying money for these questions.

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Charlie Dees
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Reed's Spring Tournament 3/3

Post by Charlie Dees »

At least now you have more interesting memories of the bad questions. (Point that I told you to go to UMR, not Reed Springs)

Who was the question company?

ryan
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Reed's Spring Tournament 3/3

Post by ryan »

Quillen or something like that I think.

The questions they used last year were pretty good. I didn't have any reason to think it the questions would be terrible.

I personally would have rather gone to the UMR tournament but most people on are team would chose a 15 minute drive or a several hour one










:)

ryan
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Reed's Spring Tournament 3/3

Post by ryan »

Heh. I found their website...

http://quillinsquestions.com/index.html

It should give you a pretty good idea about what the questions were like.

Historyman
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Reed's Spring Tournament 3/3

Post by Historyman »

For some reason the questions today at Conway were probably worse. If you have a bonus question category of distance on a number line it is pretty bad.

Historyman
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Reed's Spring Tournament 3/3

Post by Historyman »

Yep those questions sucked also.

FZW Coach
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Reed's Spring Tournament 3/3

Post by FZW Coach »

On the flip side, the questions at Rolla were some of the better questions I have heard. There were some typos and the math questions were not all that great, but overall they were very well written.

East Buc & UMR
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Reed's Spring Tournament 3/3

Post by East Buc & UMR »

There were some typos and the math questions were not all that great, but overall they were very well written.
Sums up a UMR tournament since March 2003.

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DeckardCain
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Reed's Spring Tournament 3/3

Post by DeckardCain »

FZW Coach wrote: math questions were not all that great
I'm going to wait a bit and see what everyone else thought of the tournament before I post a full reply, but I'd like to respond to this seperately - this is a perfectly valid criticism, and, as Bill alludes to, one that we at UMR hear far too often.

One reason for this is that, being a highly technical school, we as the question authors haven't come into contact with high school level math since we were in high school ourselves, but this is no excuse.

I guess we don't exactly understand what the upper-level teams actually expect from quiz bowl math questions. I do think the math questions in this tournament were toned down in difficulty from previous tournaments, although everyone can feel free to refute this. A common complaint of mine in high school, being a math-oriented player (and, coincidentally, a math major in college) was that the math didn't accurately reflect what was being taught in class. That's why we've tried to avoid questions like "what is the sine of angle x?" and "what's the slope of this line?" instead opting to incorporate these concepts into word problems. But then we run into the problem of making these problems either grossly difficult or completely unsolvable in the alloted time. We're certainly open to suggestions on how to improve the math questions we write.

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Jeffrey Hill
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Reed's Spring Tournament 3/3

Post by Jeffrey Hill »

If the sine of angle X is set on fire...

Sorry I had to do it

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redliberte
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Reed's Spring Tournament 3/3

Post by redliberte »

I'll leave praise/criticism for the math questions to john, but overall i thought everything else was quite good- of a reasonable difficulty, generally well balanced(we did somewhat feel that rounds 6 & 7 were slanted towards the humanities a bit). there were some bloopers now and then, but those happen in even the best packet. overall, well written questions- kudos to all.

johnboy81918
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Reed's Spring Tournament 3/3

Post by johnboy81918 »

redliberte wrote: I'll leave praise/criticism for the math questions to john
Well then, that's my cue.

Um...damnit, I have nothing to say










:(

I liked the math questions - decent variety, and some required actual thinking (gasp), which is much better than the traditional "what is 2+3" type of question. Some of it could've been ramped up slightly in difficulty, and I think that final rounds should have something more difficult than differentiation available. Perhaps some sort of integral, but I dunno how to incorporate that into a word problem, since I wouldn't want the question to be "what is the indefinite integral of blah blah blah". Yes, there were a few errors in the questions, but like Stephanie said, that happens, and its understandable. Job well done to UMR ACO on the question writing.

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Reed's Spring Tournament 3/3

Post by FZW Coach »

I think all of my comments are based on how can I prepare my team to be the most ready for District and State competition more so than the educational experience. I should be clear about that on all levels. I come from highly developed Bible Quiz programs (one of which I was a player and another of which I built as a coach) which placed 4th and 5th on the national level in different years.


In that light, I would like the math questions to reflect what we will see at state. I thought the algebra questions were excellent. Finally, our super sophomore Julia learned how to attack these questions (which had not been necessary all year as she competed on the junior varsity level). The derivative questions were excellent. We expect to see those questions in the Avery sets. I wouldn't mind a few antiderivatives, though as the manual states, there should only be 2 math questions at this precalculus/calculus level, which I also would love to see integrated into the sets. I personally love math history, but felt there were too many math history questions. I took a math history class as an undergraduated (actually double majored in math and history) and also one in graduate school. To be honest, it probably helped our cause a bit. I had Teri as a student last year for precalculus and for statistics this year. She is really good at remembering anything concerning math history I would mention. She is better at that than actually calculuating things. In fact, she is our 6th best math person. We were missing our top 4 math people (3 of which will surely be starters), so it actually played a bit to our favor (Julia is our 5th best at math). So, it is what it is.

They were pretty good, but I would love to see more tournaments be reflective of what we expect to see in official competition. That is one of the reasons we loved the Truman State tournament last year, since it was just two weeks before districts. I wish we had a tournament on this side of the state that would fall on that date.


More comments:

The two decimal trigonometric problems were cumbersome. The problems on the sphere were too challenging for 15 seconds (I actually was trying to figure out if I was supposed to use spherical trigonometry to solve them, but I probably overthought it a bit). I like trigonometry problems where you have to know trigonometric identitites such as sine of A is 4/5. What is sine of 2A (or something similar). You had one that worked like that, but the 2 decimal stuff took away from recognizing the identities since the caluculations were so long.


Just some thoughts . . . .

johnboy81918
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Reed's Spring Tournament 3/3

Post by johnboy81918 »

FZW Coach wrote: The two decimal trigonometric problems were cumbersome. The problems on the sphere were too challenging for 15 seconds (I actually was trying to figure out if I was supposed to use spherical trigonometry to solve them, but I probably overthought it a bit). I like trigonometry problems where you have to know trigonometric identitites such as sine of A is 4/5. What is sine of 2A (or something similar). You had one that worked like that, but the 2 decimal stuff took away from recognizing the identities since the caluculations were so long.
I don't think it took away from recognizing the identities, really. How else would you have solved it (in 15 seconds)? That's why I actually liked those questions, becuase they required that you APPLY those identities, instead of just spewing them out. I still feel kinda stupid for having mis-estimated and saying .63 instead of .64, but it was defintely doable in 15 seconds, and required a touch of math speed and knowledge in combination to get it correct.

Also, I enjoy the math history questions too, though there did seem to be more at this tourney than at any other I've been to before. No complaint about it though, I think other tourneys should just have more










:)

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Jeffrey Hill
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Reed's Spring Tournament 3/3

Post by Jeffrey Hill »

I like how this thread is basically the discuss UMR's math questions thread

I agree that 2 tossups each round and a bonus about every other round might be a little much for math non-calculations. This is mainly because there's only so much you can feasibly ask.

The one sphere question I remember us having was incredibly simple (was it something like walking along the equator through a certain degree of longitude?) but I can see how easy it is to overthink something like that.

The rounds should have followed a specific category breakdown so I'm not sure exactly how the last two rounds could have been slanted more toward humanities unless the bonuses weren't balanced properly in those two rounds. Though, I'm sure anybody could perceive some kind of category slant in certain rounds even on a set of packets that has the exact same subcategory breakdown in every round.

As for me personally, I thought I did a decent job on the 2D geometry questions. I tried to make sure the word problems were understandable and had two or three reasonable calculations to make within the 15 seconds so it wasn't just "find the area of a trapezoid with bases X and Y and height Z" but at the same time not dealing with huge numbers or excessive decimal points (I don't think any of mine had decimals in them at all)

For the trig questions with decimals, I know one was a cosine multiplied by tangent to get the sine which was perfectly reasonable; I can't remember what the other one was - maybe a double angle formula - that one might have been a little tricky for 15 seconds.

johnboy81918
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Reed's Spring Tournament 3/3

Post by johnboy81918 »

The other was:

Give sin(2theta), then it gave you the sine and cosine of theta. I said .63 instead of .64, because I misestimated the multiplication in my head










:(

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