Below are some terms that come up often in college quizbowl. For a more detailed description of the organizations involved in college quizbowl, click here.
10: when you answer a tossup correctly but not early enough to earn power (see below)
15: another word for power (see below)
A-Value: a statistical calculation used by ACF to qualify teams for ACF Nationals (see below). the NAQT equivalent of A-Values are D-Values (see above). more information about D-Values can be found here
Accessible: beginner-friendly
ACF: stands for Academic Competition Federation, which is the organization that produces the question sets used most often in college quizbowl. ACF uses packet submission to create their question sets, which are ACF Fall, ACF Winter, ACF Regionals, and ACF Nationals. each corresponds to a difficulty on the dot scale (see below). you can find their website here. for more on ACF and its differences with NAQT, click here
ACF Fall: the most popular college quizbowl tournament and question set of the year. questions are designed for novices, and veterans are discouraged from playing
ACF Nationals: one of the two premier national quizbowl tournaments, along with the NAQT ICT (see below). generally the most difficult quizbowl tournament of the year
ACF Regionals: the qualifier event for ACF Nationals, usually drawing from a regional pool of teams. this tournament is the ACF equivalent of the NAQT SCT (see below)
ACF Winter: a "middle event" of the year for ACF. while it is newer than the other three tournaments (modern edition started in 2020), ACF plans to keep the tournament a permanent fixture on the calendar
Anti-Prompt: instruction from the moderator to be less specific in order to resolve cases of ambiguity
Answerline Calibration: slightly changing the answerline of a tossup while keeping the clues intact to avoid a specific problem (e.g. changing from "Chinese Muslims" to "Muslims" to avoid unnecessary confusion).
Bonus: one of the two types of quizbowl questions, along with tossups. a bonus consists of separate easy, medium, and hard questions that are related to each other. during a bonus you can either get a 30, a 20, a 10, or a 0 (bagel), which corresponds to how many of the parts were answered correctly
Buzzer Race: when multiple players all hit their buzzers at the same time during a tossup
Clue Density: how far apart the important clues are in a tossup. high clue density is generally undesirable
Coherence: how well a question can be easily understood when read aloud
Cohesion: how well a question fits together. closely related to the idea of theme (see below)
Conversion: correct answer to a tossup or bonus
D-Value: a statistical calculation used by NAQT to qualify teams for the Intercollegiate Championship Tournament (see below). the ACF equivalent of D-Values are A-Values (see above). more information about D-Values can be found here
Difficulty Cliff: when the difficulty of a tossup drops off dramatically. typically leads to a buzzer race (see above)
Distribution: a specification that describes how many questions of each subject will appear in each round of a question set (see below). a smaller subset of the distribution is referred to as the "subdistribution".
Dot Scale: a standard difficulty scale for college question sets with four levels. one dot: novice. two dots: medium. three dots: qualifiers. four dots: nationals
Frauding: answering a question based on context alone, as opposed to the specific clues being given
Giveaway: the last clue of a tossup, typically denoted by the phrase "For ten points"
Housewrite: a question set produced solely by an independent group of writers
HSNCT: stands for High School National Championship Tournament, a high school national tournament run by NAQT (see below)
ICT / Intercollegiate Championship Tournament: one of the two premier national quizbowl tournaments, along with ACF Nationals (see above). for more information about the ICT, click here.
IQBT: stands for International Quiz Bowl Tournaments, which is an organization that produces questions for college and high school tournaments. they run the UCT (see below) and NASAT (see below), which are national competitions. for more information about IQBT, click here.
Marie Kondo Test: does your clue spark joy? would someone who studies this subject be excited by it?
Mirror: a tournament running an instance of a specific question set. most questions sets have many mirrors that occur at around the same time
Name-Dropping / Title-Dropping: when the name of a work is revealed explicitly. generally considered to be bad writing if no other information about the work has been teased beforehand
NAQT: stands for National Academic Quiz Tournaments, which is an organization that produces questions for college and high school tournaments. they run the ICT / SCT and HSNCT (see above). you can find their website here. for more on NAQT and its differences with ACF, click here.
NASAT: stands for National All-Star Academic Tournament, which is a tournament run by IQBT (see above) in which states send their best high school players to compete against each other
Neg: short for "negative five", refers to an incorrect answer to a tossup
Newsworthy / Notable: information that is important enough to use as a clue, generally related to why the subject is worth knowing about
NSC:
stands for National Scholastic Championship, a national competition for high schoolers run by PACE
stands for Notability, Specificity, and Coherence, the three qualities in question writing that are more important than difficulty control. see this page for more
PACE: stands for Partnership for Academic Excellence, an organization dedicated to the spread of quizbowl. PACE runs the NSC (see above) and gives out various awards for promotion of quizbowl
Packet Submission: a question set production method in which a central team of editors compiles a set using crowdsourced submissions from the teams involved
Power / 15: when a question is answered before a certain marking in the question known as the "power mark" (denoted by a (*) symbol), which results in extra points
PP20TUH: average points per 20 tossups for an individual, often used by NAQT for uniform statistics when an irregular number of tossups are being played in a round
PPB: average points per bonus for a team, described as a total out of 30
PPG: average points per game from tossups for an individual
Prompt: instruction from the moderator to be more specific in order to resolve cases of ambiguity
Protest: dispute filed by a player to address an error in the questions, generally resolved by a committee if it would change the outcome of a match
Pyramidal Difficulty / Inverted Pyramid: when clues are arranged in descending order of difficulty. see this page for more
Question Set: a collection of questions used for a tournament or league. question sets always follow a distribution (see above)
Rule of Themes: the more area of knowledge a question covers, the stronger its theme (see below) has to be. see this page for more
Scope: the ground that a question covers, closely related to distribution (see above) and theme (see below)
SCT / Sectional Championship Tournament: qualifier event for the NAQT ICT (see above). this tournament is the NAQT equivalent of ACF Regionals (see above). for more information about SCT, click here.
Solution Space / Answer Space: the set of topics that a tossup could plausibly be about without specific knowledge of the clues
Specificity: unique enough to be referring to one topic and one topic only
Speedcheck: a question that tests reaction time above all else. generally speedchecks do not adhere to pyramidal difficulty (see above)
Stock Clue: a clue that comes up far more than its importance would suggest (especially out-of-scope biographical clues). in practice, "stock" is often just used to describe any clue that appears frequently
Target Difficulty: the question difficulty that a set is shooting for. typically described by the dot scale (see above)
Theme: what a question is about, sort of like a question's "thesis statement". generally more specific than an answerline alone. see this page for more
Tossup: one of the two types of quizbowl questions along with bonuses. consist of a large number of clues arranged in order of descending difficulty
UCT: stands for Undergraduate Championship Tournament, which is a national tournament for undergraduates run by IQBT. for more information about the UCT, click here.
