Heads hung low and with drawn faces, the team trudged out to the playing area, they knew they were heading for another dull game and certain defeat and once again endure laughter, sneers and jeers for yet another poor performance. They were not to be disabused, 
At the Ox-Fford however, the buoyant Lemmings bounced into the room set aside for the quiz looking forward to a keenly fought but fun evening. Bob was unable to take part due to family sickness and his place was taken by Sunil, Nick’s son. The Specialist questions had been set by the Harrington Academicals which both teams thoroughly enjoyed, Dumb Britain in particular was original and great fun; nevertheless with the exception of Tomo the Lemmings’ scores were on the low side. At the end of the Specialist, the Lemmings were trailing with 44 points to the home team’s 73.The General Knowledge were less well received but did at least gain a nomination 
It was an excellent game with lots of laughter as Alan Hodgson squirmed with embarrassment as he asked the GK questions he felt should have been vetted (they probably had been but suggestions ignored)
The Ox-Fford lived up to its escalating reputation with a selection of six real ales and very friendly staff - whilst the German football match was on TV it did not intrude until either team scored that then raised another set of questions.
Individual scores were Sunil 3/9, Wendy 6/15, Nick 3/3 and Tomo 15/12 – conferred points were 13/9 with 4/9 pass-overs
The evening was rounded off with a very tasty sweetcorn chowder – many thanks to the landlord, the home team and to Alan for his patience and good humour.
14 comments:
A tense must win relegation battle at the Royal Oak and the Robin came out on the wrong side of it.
Harrington/Specialists - evened themselves out overall, a bit of everything - Science - all 8 were answered for 3, Sport - much less friendly. Dumb Britain - original and entertaining, USA Geography - a haven for list-learners. But - overall, perfectly respectable. We finished the round 4 behind, fair enough.
The GKs went down rather less well. For a team that deemed last week's GKs worthy of 0, phrases about glass houses and stones spring quickly to mind. The Cock seemed to leave behind the full gamut of quizzing faux pas.
Firstly- the minor irritations: Lacrosse has different numbers in m/f games (I didn't know this, but others did). Q38 x 2. Guillotining - yes we assumed it meant capital punishment in France, but the question was very vague. "Animus" - neither team found "soul" and out offers of "mind" and "spirit" left the QM with some tough calls to make.
At fear of earning the sore loser tag, the balance seemed to go well awry. In the heat of battle, some normally cool customers showed signs of irritation - was it just the case of unfortunate side-by-sides?
Cool reflection has led me to the following - which are, of course, subjective judgments - but the "very difficult" were too much for all eight of us.
VERY EASY QUESTIONS - FIRST SECOND (p4) Michael Fallon – asked 3 weeks ago.
(p3) Aries – again a recurring theme.
(p1) – Roger Daltrey
(p4) Douglas Bader – reasonable until the loss of legs was mentioned.
(p4) Suspension Bridge
(p1) President Mitterand
(p4) Book following Acts (was the imbalanced predecessor to the Guernica a while back)
(p1) Ceaucescu – too much detail.
FIRST FIRST
Richard Osman (p3)
First name of Wellington (p4)
VERY DIFFICULT QUESTIONS
FIRST SECOND (p1) Grantly Adams airport
FIRST FIRST TCP (p1)
The Sejm (p2)
The Faithful City (p3)
Cupar (p3)
There is a fair old chance that Tuesday's match will determine relegation issues. The winning margin was 15 points - to what extent this reflected merit and/or balance is debateable. Generally good humoured teams were somewhat antagonistic by close of play. Rarely do we hand out a mark of below 5 to the questions, we settled on 2.
Some fair points, AAD. The "All About the US" round was disappointing as it's a reasonable idea that became mostly about abbreviations and capitals. The "Dumb Britain" round was an amusing idea, but one or two of the "correct" answers were a bit too straightforward and I doubt whether anyone went for the "incorrect" answers. In the GK as you said one or two of the pairings were a bit ill-considered. Of the 2 successive airport questions most people would, I think, have preferred the "terminals at Heathrow" question to the "where is Grantly Adams airport" one. Similarly with the "mother of Edward 6" and "father of Victoria" pairing, the first was probably a lot more "gettable". Once again, good vetting by the teams involved could have spotted these inconsistencies.
Agreed with much, Alan. I forgot that the "dumb" answer was available - couldn't identify Mozambique and am annoyed that I didn't consider the other option - but perhaps that is my fault. The two pairings that you mention were not ideal, but they did cancel each other out - which is OK by me.
My main grief is that whilst on a "pair by pair basis" there will be imbalances, it was the imbalance across the whole GK that was a problem. The questions I have highlighted above are not unreasonable in isolation, but they didn't fall evenly (or I have become a bit of a Cyclops)
Both Nick and us got the same message from the Dolphin - they wanted a better set of questions but didn't get the chance to have an impact.
To go back to the point about winning the toss a few weeks back, this was an example where the old adage "go first-first" seemed counter-productive. There is a big difference between the quiz captain and the cricket captain - the latter has meaningful info about the state of the pitch etc., the former is essentially buying a pig in a poke.
For good or ill, asking the q's at The Weaver last week gave me a valuable insight into what goes down well and what does not - one that I can pass on to my team when we come to setting. I can only conclude that the relatively convivial C League atmosphere has failed to do similar.
I agree with most of the two Alans’ points, the main one being that these questions would have benefited from proper vetting (and, by all accounts, the setters taking notice of the points raised by the vetters).
I’m setting myself up for a comeback here, as we (the Ox-fford ‘C’) are setting next week. But if we make any mistakes of the sort listed below (and our vetters fail to spot them), I hope someone will point them out.
Specialist questions:
Round 2 (Dumb Britain): Question 4: the correct answer is “Hanover”. I quote Wikipedia: “[Victoria] was the last British monarch of the House of Hanover. Her son and successor, Edward VII, belonged to the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, the line of his father.” For further confirmation, The Official Website of the British Monarchy lists Queen Victoria under the Hanoverians and only Edward VII under Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. (The facts that her mother was a Saxe-Coburg, that she married a Saxe-Coburg, and that she was not Queen of Hanover, are all irrelevant.)
Incidentally, I'd failed to realise that the actual answer given by the contestant was acceptable. Either our QM failed to read this out, or (more likely) I wasn't listening!
Round 8 (Famous New Zealanders), Question 2: Kiri Te Kanawa was born in 1944, not 1964. Only a typo, but such typos can easily cause confusion in the mind of the contestant who’s under pressure to come up with the correct answer. This could and should have been eliminated by vetting.
General Knowledge
There were two Q38s!
Q70: the county of Fife, of which Cupar was the county town, ceased to exist in 1975. Fife is now a “council area” whose administrative HQs are in Glenrothes. The question should either point out that it’s referring to a historical entity, or ask for the administrative HQ of the current council area (which is Glenrothes).
Q77: According to the New Oxford Dictionary, the Greek word anima means “breath”. Chambers gives four different meanings: “air”, “breath”, "life" or “soul” (in that order). I might add that our question master (the strict but fair Peter McBride) had no qualms about rejecting the answer “mind” (given by me!).
Q85: resorting to Chambers again, a cilium is “one of the fine hair-like structures … on the surface of a cell”. In other words, not specific to the respiratory tract. Again, this is liable to cause confusion in the mind of the contestant (which IIRC was the same one as the Kiri Te Kanawa question).
Q87: according to both of the dictionaries already cited, a quokka is not a kangaroo but a wallaby. Wikipedia on the other hand says it’s “a small macropod”, and cites both kangaroos and wallabies as “other marsupials in the macropod family”. So “macropod”, far from being a smart-alec’s answer, is probably the most correct one. In any case, if "kangaroo" was accepted, it would appear that "wallaby" was at least equally correct; and "marsupial" should also have been accepted.
And finally: you may think I’m getting really picky here, but Q52, as it stands, is not only (IMHO) a really boring question but I reckon that green is about the last colour that anyone would guess. At least, no one in the Dolphin quiz room that night guessed it correctly. How much more interesting, and more gettable, if the question had made some reference to evolution and the environment (i.e. the probable reason why human eyes are particularly sensitive to green light).
It was obvious that the general knowledge questions this week had been thoroughly vetted, and equally clear that all that hard work had been completely ignored!
This is more than just an annoyance. Referring to AAD's comment, some teams can face the prospect of playing relegation battles with bad question sets. Then there's the effect on individual scores. It all matters when the gongs are handed out at the AGM.
This obviously isn't fair, but there is a solution that might at least make the perpetrators of bad question sets take notice of their vetting notes.
The questions are scored by the teams playing on the night. While gongs are given for good sets, I propose penalising the worst with the loss of points if they fall below an agreed minimum overall score.
Some very good points made by all the above correspondents. The docking of points from teams setting questions is a tricky one, but might start a whole debate all of its own...
On the night, we were playing the Waters Green Lemmings and we went second in the Specialist round / first in the GK and I think we had the better of the questions overall.
As many have said, we enjoyed the Specialist rounds which showed evidence of a great deal of thought going into them. The “Dumb Britain” round was novel and interesting, although most of the wrong answers would have been hard to guess. That said, Wendy Brown did a sterling job by answering “Portugal” for Q3 rather than Mozambique!
Kiri Te Kanawa has stayed remarkably young as Haydn suggests – just a typo there, I’m sure – although the Ox-fford’s Mr Shaw belied his reputation by getting it right for a 3 anyway!
Now, the GK were like my mother – very awkward indeed.
No one in any game got a 3 for Herbert Sutcliffe as England’s highest Test Match batting average holder, nor did anyone known Graham Norton’s real name. We came up with “Carry on Again Doctor” for a conferred, but not a 3 in sight across all Leagues for that one either and there will be many more of those, I’m sure.
My previous life informed me (in the nicest possible way) that there is now only one prison on the Isle of Wight, formed from an amalgamation of the previous three (namely Parkhurst, Albany and Camp Hill) and now known only as HMP Isle of Wight!
My old fashioned, far away and largely redundant academic life told me that the word “animal” is believed to derive from the Latin Animus meaning mind or soul, but as Latin is a much more expressive language than our poor English (where three words can translate as at least a paragraph), another way of asking the question would have been preferable. Sunt lacrimae rerum, as they (or I) say, not that anyone’s listening…
I would agree with Haydn that Q52 and the answer “Green” is a bit bizarre, but three people got a 3 for that – but that might just have been a good guess!
We had a very entertaining evening – and thanks to the Waters Green Lemmings for their part in that – but there were some very tough questions in there, particularly going second in the GK, and the overall scores on the night will be interesting.
As Haydn shows, the deeper (and cleverer) one digs the worse it gets.
Am slightly smug that, whilst my team got their point for "Saxe-Coburg Gotha", my offer of Hanover was correct. Misspent youth spent with a "Royal Line of Succession" procured from Warwick Castle taught me firmly that Ed7 was the only SCG monarch.
Not sure I buy into point penalties for teams being awarded low marks for setting. All kinds of perverse incentives can be unleashed when the team setting the q's is near to us in the league. Nor should team points scored be used as a stick - would much rather play in a game involving the unforgiving but balanced q's of the British Flag/KKAs last year than a more answerable, but imbalanced set.
There is a sneaky temptation to suggest that those teams finishing bottom of the QSL should be condemned to read questions at A League fixtures until the penny drops. And, yes, we set a lousy GK round last year and got the marks that we deserved.
In terms of the Ox-fford C setting qs next week - I can remember last year's well - very accessible and interesting, but I could sense (as we inflicted an absolute battering on our opponents - those were the days) that the breeze was firmly behind us.
On the other hand, our next three games are the Weaver, Ox-fford C and Dolphin. Perhaps some extreme imbalance might come in useful.
To indulge in gratuitous pedantry:-
Herbert Sutcliffe's average is the highest of any established England Test Batsmen (more than 10 innings). But three individuals (Wood, Valentine and Hill) all exceeded his average in their few games.
Similarly, the Boycott of Trinidad, Andy Genteaume scored 112 in his only innings in 1948, but was dropped for slow scoring - shoving Bradman into second place.
The super-pedant would argue that there are almost certainly some tailenders with infinite averages owing to one or two not-outs.
VG Specialist questions, shocking General Knowledge.
Whoever set the GK should be shot - preferably more than once.
I have had an idea of encouraging the setting of reasonable questions by some sort of system of giving the people responsible for them the average of the week in their league to add to their own individual scores. Thus if you wrote a set of questions which resulted in poor scores all round you would get a similar score on your record and a more accessible set would result in getting a higher score for yourself. Would need a bit of thought but might be an incentive. Any thoughts on problems, drawbacks, etc?
Much as one would love to inflict a penalty after Tuesday, there are lots of reasons to hold back.
1) Low scores are not always an indicator of difficult qs. A few "big hitters" taking the night off together, end of season apathy, teams happy in a division trying hard to avoid promotion - it happens and could certainly militate against the team who sets last...Indeed, the qs set by the Weaver scored "worst" for "difficulty" in 2014, but seemed reasonable when I waded through them.
2) Low scores are less of a problem than imbalance. Better that two equally matched teams draw 115-115, then it end up 180-160 with the margin engineered by imbalance. I would rather the former setters be rewarded. Points penalties for difficulty may also lead to overly facile quizzes set to steer safely clear of them - a good quiz should have me scoring 20-24 points fewer than the best players, if I get 51 and Haydn gets 60 that is not a good sign.
3) Spotting genuine imbalance would be difficult. Some teams will, quite rightly, thrash others. On a night when 11 strong teams play 11 weak ones, it would be far from odd for the strong ones to end up on the same questions 7/8 times and to create an illusion of imbalance. Turn it round the other way, surface balance could mask unfair questions.
My best bet is that:
1) A one point penalty is issued to teams who do not submit qs for vetting regardless of the outcome.
2) Setters are matched with the top team in the QSL from the A league adopting the bottom one from the C league and the middle one from the B league and so on. When the teams lower in the QSL submit questions to the ones higher, the vetting system becomes a case of the "vetters" making binding changes rather than recommendations - as such, the GK on Tuesday would have been modified to the Dolphin's contentment. Probably a fiddly system to engineer but one that could reduce problems without potentially unfair penalties.
The introduction of either
(a) penalties or
(b) vetters having power to over-rule setters
would surely result in teams leaving the league.
What makes you say that? If a setter can't accept that a clearly wrong question (e.g. Q 70 on 1st December "On what does the Speaker sit in the House of Commons?") must be taken out, what does that say about them?
Indeed, if the vetters could simply change the questions and then print them themselves (with the process reversed on the opposite occasion in the season) I would hope that his would make life quicker and easier for the setting team.
A possible modification of the QSL league could lead to trios of teams being awarded a combined total for a night - one would hope that this could develop a collegiate approach to question design, rather than conscientious vetters being seen as busybodies.
I would hope that any reasonable participant would much rather one/two teams' nose be put out of joint each week by not getting the questions that they initially wrote rather than 11 (or, indeed, 22) teams who get on the wrong end of them. Anyone who disagrees vehemently enough with this, in principle at least, to leave the league should, perhaps, be welcome to do so.
In my professional life, I am involved in the writing of national examinations. Any question we set goes to a reviser who assesses the question and the balance between different options and then recommends changes - they are expected to do so. We can choose to ignore them if we give a written justification and, on our own head be it if we do. I have never heard the faintest whisper of opposition to such a system in principle, and very few grumbles in how it is practically administered. It also does a good job (with occasional lapses) of stopping flaky questions getting anywhere near having a real impact. If a question-setter did not submit their questions they would be fired fairly quickly.
And, yes, I do appreciate that there is a difference in gravitas between Tuesday night and terminal exams, but good habits are good habits.
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