That’s Debatable…

That’s Debatable…Our new format that asks a couple of members of the BQ community to discuss two Bible Quiz subjects and I get to appoint a winner.  This week we have Aaron Wells, the former lead quizzer for 3 time national champion Pleasant View KY.  In the opposite corner, we have Luke Miller, a long time quizzer for Old Paths who competed at SCQANIT and AACS this year.  Let’s get to the questions.
Propose a new rule (one that is not currently used at any of the 4 “major” tournaments) that would make quizzing more interesting.
Luke: One change I would make would be to eliminate all full reference questions. Too many quizzes have been lost or won on a this type. Full reference don’t reward a quizzer for knowing his verses or keywords. It just all comes down to guessing. Now, I know this rule would never completely work, but if they were only used sparingly, there would be a lot less errors. And this is all coming from a former quizzer who hated full reference, so maybe I’m a little biased.

Aaron: One rule that would be EXTREMELY beneficial to Bible Quizzing involves tiebreakers. I think that there should be no points taken off if you miss a tiebreaker!! If you miss two and the other team misses the tossups, and then you get the next THE SCORE IS TIED AGAIN. What do you do?? Have another tiebreaker? Does the team that got the question win? Does the team that missed two free questions get another shot? What if the first team misses three? Does that put them out of reach?? I am ALWAYS so confused when tiebreakers are asked and one team misses and gets ten points off. Make the tiebreaker a Free Question. No error out. No quiz out. No ten points off. The first team to get it correct wins…..

Editor: Aaron, I think yours is a good idea; I was hoping for something a little, well, bigger though.  Luke, this is a big change and maybe a lot of people agree with you on this one.  For my two cents, I like full reference questions.  You do end up having to make some guesses if you’re going to be the first one up on these questions, but I think they’re usually educated guesses.  To me, the no reference questions are more of a guess in that you have to guess when to jump in order to get the amount of information you need to correctly answer the question.  Aaron, I’d be interested to get your take on this.

Answer Rater:  Aaron 3/10.  Luke 5/10.
The debate always comes up during finals week as to which tournament does toss up questions the better way. Should there be new tossup questions if the first question is answered incorrectly, stick with re-asking the original question, or is there a third solution which is even better?

Luke: I have always been an advocate of the same tossup question, but recently, I have been seeing the need to change this format. When two competitive teams are going hard after the tossup, there can easily be 6-8 fouls handed out. And when the quizmaster finally rules a jump properly timed,(no offense to any quizmasters) it usually is no different than any of the other jumps. He is just getting wore down. This is not fair to the quizzers or the quizmaster.  And a new tossup question is not the answer.  This does not reward a team for not erroring the initial question, and more often than not the tossup is errored, causing more time to be lost.  Some quizmaster let quizzers jump when they start “question”, and this has been met with limited success, but has not been widely accepted.  My solution to this issue is this: limit the number of fouls a team can get to three: after the limit has been reached, an error is assessed, and the other team receives a free question. This would require teams to be far more disciplined, or they would face the consequences. I have never seen this format used, so it may be a complete flop. But I think we all agree something needs to be done.

Aaron: I have talked to many quizzers and they all seem to like AACS style tossup the best. Having been a quizzer, and having seen limited time as a quizmaster, I have to agree. The reason that “I” liked it so much was because I could pass off the question to Josh Voyles and he was UNBEATABLE at getting the tossup jump. However, it does get extremely aggravating to quizmasters to have to call like fourteen fouls over one tossup question. As a quizmaster, it also gets frustrating at Scqanit trying to figure out which page of questions is tossup, and which questions you have used already. My solution: leave tossups new at Scqanit, it makes the tournament what it is, and it makes teams adjust. Leave AACS as the same question, but CHANGE THAT STUPID CHALLENGE RULE!! Okay that’s all.

Editor: Aaron, you’re too nice.  I guess that is what makes this such an easy topic to debate:  everyone wants to reward teams that know the answer after one team misses the initial question is missed (this is one of the coolest and most challenging parts of quizzing); on the other hand, it really stinks when there are tons of fouls and it becomes an impossibly difficult decision for quizmasters and only increases in likelihood as the quality of the teams and the importance of the quizzes goes up.  This is why I like Luke’s answer a lot.  To all the quiz directors out there, give Luke’s rule a try.  Let’s call it the Miller Rule.  Maybe even decrease the number of fouls to 2…

Answer Rater:  Aaron 3/10.  Luke 9/10.

Final Score:  Aaron 6.  Luke 14.

Luke is today’s winner.

All Time That’s Debatable…Leading Winners

Luke Miller – 1.