Sunday, May 10, 2009

Season One -- An Epilogue

A long, successful season -- with 17 weeks of quizzing -- came to an end on the wee hours of Friday night (or Saturday early morning, if you wish :-). Here are some of my thoughts on the first season.

I think we will continue to have another great season next semester. We had a very enthusiastic turn-out -- almost all quizzes had six teams with atleast 3-4 people each -- which is a really impressive turnout for a quiz club in grad school! A lot of people made their debuts as a quiz master, by setting either a half-quiz or a full-quiz. But that number can easily increase, perhaps by having a bigger season with more people doing a full-quiz :-)

And, at the risk of sounding like an (IGSA?) propaganda minister, the numbers above are only half of the number of people who showed up for atleast a couple of quizzes. Seems like there are lot of enthusiasts out there who find it hard to come on a regular basis. If you know why, please comment and let's do something about it.

In general, please comment on anything to make this more fun, like more novel and quirky formats (yes, you all know my fetish for rather complex, convulated creations), more theme-based quizzes (or not), more food/drinks (with a way to procure them :-)) or anything else.

And for those who care, the final season standings are available at
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pad8OkPTEUANT0-QEnI_oTA

The top ten finishers, based on the sum of best 13 (of 17) scores, are Swapnil (103 pts), Keshav (89 pts), Vyas (70 pts), Varun and Nishtha (58 pts), Deepak (58 pts), Gaurav (57 pts), Apurva (56 pts), Pranav and Suyash(55 pts).


Thanks to everyone who participated!

9 comments:

  1. "Seems like there are lot of enthusiasts out there who find it hard to come on a regular basis. If you know why, please comment and let's do something about it."

    --> "people" have "plans"

    ReplyDelete
  2. I guess now that the first season is over, we can all thank tommy and apurva for starting the club. Extra thanks to tommy for the weekly admin work and entertaining reports.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Great job Swapnil ! I think now you are in a position to have permanent 6 seeds for next season....

    Also I think people should contribute token amounts next season to award prizes to the top 3 :) Seems like a nice idea and would be an incentive for other members to chase down the top guns !

    Will definitely try to follow the updates on this blog next season:)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Truly the highlight of this sem (and indeed even the last sem) for me. I had only 2 days in the week - Friday and not Friday (yeah I know I have no life). My thanks to all of you for putting up with my eccentricities on the field and for making this such a memorable experience, 17 quizzes on the trot is quite a feat, don't think I've ever had that.

    As for the next sem, I may sound like an elitist here, but I've always felt that popularizing quizzing is a tad difficult and akin to popularizing test cricket (I have a cricket/dark knight analogy for almost anything) - I tried it for 3 years as an undergrad and it just didn't work, so getting a turnout of even 20 people per quiz is great. I've told lots of people about our quizzes and some of them occasionally came, but only real enthusiasts are going to show for almost all quizzes and I think we have around 20 of them. Personally speaking, I'm fine if just the usual suspects show up every time, but otherwise I guess the only way to get more is to advertise more, and also "anonymous" has a point, people, apparently have lives, so unless they place quizzing atop a pedestal, something else is always going to be more important. Also its a kind of vicious circle, people who haven't quizzed too much, don't enjoy the feeling of coming to a quiz and then not being able to contribute for a lot of questions, but the only way to get better at quizzes is to go for as many as possible(by the time you are done with 10 quizzes and if you keep track of stuff, you'll see that there are only so many important facts about JFK,KKK,SRK or POK or that there are 4 famous Hungarians - Houdini (added to my list after Siddharth's quiz), Rubik, the guy who invented the ball pt pen and the guy who invented the hologram).To summarize I wouldn't worry too much about improving turnout, since I feel its fine the way it is and its difficult (and in my experience, not worth the trouble) to convince people to spend a Friday night in the company of geeks or knurds who seem to have all the answers for seemingly absurd stuff.

    Themed quizzes sound good, but maybe for half the quiz...unless its a very broad theme like sports, entertainment, lit etc...a full quiz on some topics may meander after a while if not enough people know about the theme - for eg a cricket/football quiz might be great for some and boring for others, but I could be wrong.we could maybe try a full quiz of only connects (obviously difficult for 1 person to make, so at least 2 quizmasters would be needed), or something like that too (I'm just brainstorming here).

    Timings are perfect and I guess we bend them for certain events/when some of us are not free, which is great. Scoring pattern is also fine by me.

    OK I've just realized that I haven't actually come up with any possible changes, but I'm kind of a 'really stick with something you like guy', so lastly, I wouldn't change the man at the helm either. Many, many thanks to Swpanil for sending out those initial emails about starting a quiz club around the Diwali quiz time, then coming up with all possible ways to make it interesting and for keeping the books as it were, so even though we refer to him as the fuhrer, my vote goes to him as he coordinated something really special.

    Looking forward to 17 quizzes next sem

    ReplyDelete
  5. "anonymous" posts are highly discouraged :-)

    ReplyDelete
  6. OK, actually I may have been of the mark when I said we have around 20 enthusiasts, more like 25 or so for next sem. At least 99% people who have their name on the scoring sheet are interested and generally make time for quizzes, there were at least 10-15 other people who were probably interested but couldn't make it on a regular basis due to various reasons.

    ReplyDelete
  7. for some reason it didnt let me post.. hence the anonymous post :-)

    ReplyDelete
  8. i'm showing withdrawal symptoms :(...its going to be a cruel summer with nothing to look forward to on fridays! i think i'l work on getting a life :)

    ReplyDelete
  9. It really was pretty amazing having 17 quizzes nearly on the trot. I think it's the highest quizzing density I've ever experienced and it was great fun! Hats off to Tommy for keeping it going!

    ReplyDelete