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News

9/16/2008
Practices resume on September 16, 2008 in the 1952 Room on the cafeteria level of Frist at 7:30 PM. New members welcome.

1/19/2008
Princeton places second at TIT and goes 7-3 at the ABD mirror at UMD.

1/19/2008
Princeton places places fourth at EFT2 at Brown.

 

Introduction

Welcome to Princeton College Bowl! We are a student club which organizes practices, hosts tournaments like Princeton University Buzzerfest and the fifty-five team Princeton High School Tournament, and sends teams to compete in various tournaments in the region. Princeton's quiz bowl team is quite deep, with a large group of talented first- and second-year players balanced by a few experienced veterans, and we always welcome new faces at meetings.

Regular practices are held Tuesday and Wednesday evenings starting around 7:30 PM in the Frist Campus Center, and beginning this year we will be practicing in the Class of 1952 Room. If you're coming from afar to attend one of our glorious practices, e-mail cbowl@princeton.edu for more information. We start at 7:30 PM and the duration of practice is directly proportional to the amount of schoolwork to be completed by attendees.

What Is Quiz Bowl?

Princeton competes in a variety of formats. The whole college quiz game concept seems to have originated with CBI (College Bowl, Inc.) College Bowl began decades ago as a radio show, moved to television, and then retreated to organizing and writing questions for mainly non-broadcast tournaments. In the late 1980's, though, a "circuit" of southeastern universities dissatisfied with CBI began to form. Quiz teams would write packs of questions in the CBI format and meet at tournaments to play on these questions. Today, the invitational circuit of teams has grown to include universities across the United States and Canada. The original circuit was essentially ACF (Academic Competition Foundation), but a more recent group, NAQT (National Academic Quiz Tournaments), was formed by circuit graduates to sell questions to high school and university teams, eliminating the need for invitational tournaments to solicit questions from participating teams.

No matter what format the questions are, the game is more or less the same. Teams of four players buzz in individually to answer "tossup" questions on a variety of academic or pop culture questions, and the team which answers correctly gets 10 points and the sole right to answer a "bonus" question generally worth 30 points. Depending on format, games maybe timed or untimed. It's like many of the high school competitions that exist around the continent - It's Academic, Reach for the Top/Schoolreach, Academic Challenge, etc. For a good description of academic competition, please see Swarthmore's "Academic competition basics" page.

More Info

For more information, please email us at cbowl@princeton.edu

There are two currently popular forums for quizbowl discussion, Yahoo! Groups's Quizbowl group and Matt Weiner's hsquizbowl.org forum.


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   © 2002 Princeton University College Bowl  –  last updated 11/29/04