Post by Great Bustard » Sat Jul 30, 2016 6:00 am

The Quest for the Historical Mukherjesus wrote:

The fact that several tournaments at IHO were being written immediately before they were happening is an absolute organizational failure. Futhermore, this kind of thing keeps happening with NHBB, and it cannot continue to happen if NHBB wants to be representative of good academic competition. This is made worse by the fact that several writers at IHO were frantically trying to finish the tournament while other NHBB staffers were soaking in Hawaii; this is quite distasteful to any notion of fairness (to be clear, this appears to be an organizational issue and not an instance of staffers shirking their duties).



[*] The writing corps for NHBB is not nearly on par with those of PACE, NAQT, HSAPQ, or ACF. I regret having to call out particular people, but examples are instructive. Examples like the editor of the scramble event, Arthur Lee, believing that a tossup on the 2016 Harvard Measles outbreak was a good idea (then ignoring my comments stating as much), and volume-writer (and I use the term "writer" with distaste) Andrew Leung spamming ~60 questions that look like they'd been Gibson-assembled from lists of named things on Wikipedia. The latter is particularly frustrating for me personally, as I had to fix those questions, for which he will be paid more than I would for basically re-writing them. These things would not be even remotely acceptable in other quizbowl organizations, but because we were in dire straits, all hands were on deck.



[*] This lack of prioritization of writing is reflected in the way money is spent within NHBB. The writing and editing fees for NHBB are not on par with peer quizbowl organizations (even though for editors, its far more work - see above bullet point), yet Madden has enough money to jet-set around the globe with Niki Peters, Shravan Balaji, and Raynell Cooper, to pay for high quality ping-pong paddles, etc.



[*] Finally, IHO was made patently worse by the fact that, on top of several of the events not being completed before people landing in Hawaii, Dave Madden demanded over 100 questions for a hybrid ping-pong/quizbowl event that only a week before, writers were told to "not worry about"; it seems he *in particular* wanted them written as IHO was ongoing. Furthermore, several of these questions were apparently recycled from previous sets. I don't know if this is a consequence of the breakneck pace, or by design, but either way it's horrifying. This demonstrates a huge lack of respect for writers, for the writing process, the quality of his events, and for basic axioms of how quizbowl works.[/list]



The fundamental thread here is that Dave Madden cannot tell a good question from a bad question, and more importantly, he doesn't seem to care, preferring to focus on pageantry and superficial trappings. Good questions take work, care, time, and research, and cannot be written at the breakneck pace that Dave seems to demand them. I would want people to be aware of this before deciding to work for NHBB, especially those considering working for the organization formally and not freelancing.

Some of the concerns here (e.g. what writers and editors earn) are things that Brad and I will be discussing shortly, and anticipate changing going forward. Having said that, there are some points here that need some clarification. On the matter of who did what at the Olympiad, different staffers came to the Olympiad to help with different tasks. Some staffers may not have fully understood that, though I think it should be clear that in any organization at any event, different tasks are expected of different people. Any number of the staff were themselves not equipped to assist with writing, which isn't an issue, since any event like the Olympiad requires all sorts of different skill sets.In terms of the writing process itself, I don't want to comment much since Brad was in charge of that, and as he's mentioned, I don't wish to interfere with his approach to putting together the question sets. I do take issue with the fact that I have no ability to tell a good question from a bad question, having, over the course of six years, spent hundreds of hours myself improving our sets.On the matter of recycled questions, I spoke with Brad about this and he confirmed that this didn't happen in anything he oversaw. The only example of this came with the Table Combined set (which is meant to be a bit more light-hearted an event than the events which are exclusively buzzer-based) and which I took responsibility for putting together. My original idea for this was that it would be some combination of my writing, the writing of some other staff who came on board to the Olympiad staff close in towards the event, partly with this set in mind), and also knowing that I had a stash of questions which I had the rights to (mostly questions I had written before HSAPQ began generating our sets), which had never been posted publicly, and which I knew 100% no one attending the Olympiad had heard. In the end, it was this latter approach that ended up primarily being utilized, though some people (including myself) did contribute a number of fresh questions to. Raynell Cooper took the lead in reconfiguring these sets so that they worked for Table Combined, and I'm grateful to him for his help on that. But this is a very, very limited example of recycling, and ultimately had very little impact on the overall course of the Olympiad.