Saturday, July 17, 2010

My Tata Crucible crib

Disclaimer: This is just my viewpoint.

Every single year the Tata crucible quiz surpasses expectation on the teams participating due to the prize money involved. I have some really good memories about previous tata crucibles -- 2004 , I was about 8 or 9 months out of college , was representing Infy and was the first Biz quiz that I qualified for.

Having got that out of the way .. I now come to the grouse part. I believe this is generally the time that the research team works on the questions for TC and knowing Giri looks into all the quiz blogs -- i really hope , he takes these as positive feedback.

Quantity of Questions:

While everyone understands that doing the quiz in 20 centers is a huge effort and have to cut a few corners, one of the things that irk most of the people that I speak to , is the fact that the prelims have more questions than the finals.

Just when you think the teams are getting started -- the quiz ends. There is one visual round , one dry round and then move on to buzzers. While it is done in a format to ensure CNBC is able to squeeze the entire quiz into 30 mins( with the ads if I may add), it robs the live audience at grand ballrooms of Taj hotels, an opportunity to watch the teams battle out. What this also means is that a team that is good for about 30 mins on a single day  reach the national semi finals. If the TV show is the problem there are two ways out of this problem

1. CNBC increasing the Quiz length to 1 hour( not likely)
2. Do not have some rounds for TV ( there are any quite a few questions that are cutoff from each round on the TV) ( the more likely option).

Buzzer:
Over the last 6 years.. giri has tried a lot of different things with the buzzer -- Full quiz on buzzer ( like in 2005) , then moving onto a part of the quiz on buzzer and kudos to the experiments. One of the formats that I feel that hasnt been used ( didnt see the 2007,2008 versions) is the pounce and bounce method that was used by Mitesh in his quizzes.


Again two justifications for this

1.While it gives the opportunity for folks to go for the buzzer, it also helps teams that are not so good on the buzzer. For teams that do not have the answer , it gives an opportunity to work it out as it passes thru teams normally , even if one team has got it on the buzzer.
2. If a team is behind on points -- the opportunity to score of each and every question is still there for them. That wouldn't be the case in a pure infinite bounce round.


End of RANT!!! :)

If there are any other feedbacks, leave them on the comment page. 

2 comments:

Anish said...

Let me state the obvious, IMHO, for those who care: even for school quizzes conducted by serious quizzers pro-bono, a 100 question final (25-30 in elims and 60-65 in finals) is the norm. That's the least I expect from a national level quiz that tom toms its credentials. If this is taken care of, format mostly does not matter, the quality and duration of the quiz ensures that the good teams rise to the top. End of comment-rant.

Yagnyesh said...

True.. couldnt agree more with you. I remember 2004 and 2005 quizzes being long and really enjoyable. somehow these days, u feel 1 question determines how you do in the quiz.