League System

Starting with the first quiz of this season, we will experiment with a "league" system that is aimed at randomizing team formations to have more balanced teams. In a nutshell, we will maintain a points table for all the quizzes in the season and every week teams will be formed such that the top-2N league leaders (called seeds) are in N different teams and the rest of the team is formed by random picks.

To bootstrap the system, last semester's volunteers will be the seeds for the first week. We should have 10-12 seeds who will be spread out into different teams. Rest of the participants join the teams randomly. After the quiz, the top three teams will get 10, 7 and 4 points respectively (i.e., each member in the team will get 10, 7 and 4 points each). All the other participants get 1 point each.

For their effort, the quizmaster also gets points determined by the number of questions in the quiz and number of questions answered in the quiz. 

If the session is organized by a single quizmaster (30+ questions), the individual gets 2 points. If 40%-60% quiz questions are answered, the quiz master gets an additional bonus point. Anything outside that range is either too hard or too easy, both detrimental to the "fun factor" (the range is subject to debate, please comment if you have a good, simple heuristic :-))

If the session is organized by two individuals, they share the points (i.e., they get 1 point each and 0.5 bonus points, if applicable).

At the end of the season (say, last week of June 2008), we will use the top 75% scores of each participant for final standings. This way, we can accommodate for cases when people have to miss a quizzing session for other engagements. The winner gets attractive prizes, including the title of "league commissioner" (tbd) for next season.

I will volunteer to maintain and publish the league statistics (though, co-conspirators are welcome).

There are lots of ways to make it more complicated and fun. So please comment :-)