NAQT has made a number of changes to its rules and policies for the 2020–2021 season:

General

In all official NAQT documents, we now use “they” (and related pronouns) to refer to persons of unspecified or general gender (rather than “he or she,” etc.).

Licensing Policy

We substantially rewrote the Licensing Policy, which applies to NAQT study materials acquired by purchasing them as practice material or playing or hosting most tournaments using NAQT questions. We clarified many aspects, including but not limited to those related to online practices.

The only substantive change is the elimination of the rule that organizationally licensed practice materials may be used with “mixed groups” if at least two-thirds of the group is affiliated with the organization holding the license. Instead, we allow the use of licensed practice materials for the purpose of introducing people to quiz bowl (which was the purpose of the two-thirds rule), with specific parameters for defining such groups.

Gameplay Rules

We made the following changes to the NAQT Gameplay Rules (highlighted on the page):

• Bonus questions are now paired with tossup questions. This does not refer to content (i.e., tossups and bonuses are not related in terms of content, or if they are, it is a coincidence); it only refers to numbering and presentation. For example, if tossups 1 and 3 are answered correctly but tossup 2 is not, then bonuses 1 and 3 will be read, but bonus 2 will not be read. (Previously, bonus 2 would be read after tossup 3, because the rule was to use the first bonus that had not already been used.) Several rules changes relate to this overall change.
• We combined and clarified several rules related to replacement questions.
• Matches at the Community College Championship Tournament will now use 11-minute halves (just like matches at the Intercollegiate Championship Tournament).
• It is now specified that reading tossups out of order, while undesirable, is not a protestable error.
• It is now specified that replacement questions are always read off the clock.

Correctness Guidelines

We made one type of change to the NAQT Correctness Guidelines: the rules related to names have been reworded to be in terms of surnames/family names and given names rather than first and last names. For example, “Xi” is the required portion of the name “Xi Jinping” because “Xi” is the family name, even though it comes first. This was always the intent of our rules, but we used imprecise wording; now the rules match our intent and practice.

Eligibility Rules

We made the following changes to NAQT Eligibility Rules (Middle School, High School, Community College, and Collegiate):

• In all four, we added the following rule:

  When considering bans, NAQT will apply Section K of its Official Rules. This may be applied to conduct that occurred at quiz bowl tournaments (regardless of whether the tournaments used the Official NAQT Rules and/or NAQT questions) or outside of tournaments.

• In the Middle School Eligibility Rules and High School Eligibility Rules, we added extensive rules regarding online schools and homeschools, and clarified the effect of non-online schools implementing online instruction temporarily. Briefly:
  • The regular definition of “school” now only covers schools that students typically attend in-person. Online schools are defined separately. If a non-online school temporarily switches to online instruction, that does not cause them to be considered an online school.
  • The rules regarding homeschool groups have been changed to refer to homeschool co-ops rather than homeschool collectives. Homeschool co-ops may enter quiz bowl teams if the co-op offers core-curriculum classes or athletics, and each such team must consist of players who live in the same Combined Statistical Area, same county or county equivalent, or in an area that fits in a circle with a diameter of 50 miles. Furthermore, homeschooled students may play quiz bowl even if they don’t participate in a co-op (but they can’t combine with other homeschooled students, othe than from their own family or household, to form a team).
  • Homeschool co-ops and online schools must register with NAQT at least 14 days before the first time they compete in NAQT quiz bowl, and must be able to provide documentation that the co-op/school itself and all relevant students meet the criteria in the Eligibility Rules.
  • No player may, during the same competition year, compete for multiple homeschool co-ops, multiple online schools, or a combination of non-online (i.e., in-person) schools and homeschool co-ops and/or online schools, regardless of established affiliation. In other words, during a single competition year, a player may only represent a single homeschool co-op, a single online school, or one or more non-online schools.

We changed the College Division II Eligibility Rules to specify that if a team is invited to the Intercollegiate Championship Tournament fewer than 21 days before it starts, the invitation may be declined without costing the team’s players their Division II eligibility. We also made a number of non-substantive changes to those rules to improve their clarity.

Qualification Rules

We added the following to all qualification rules for NAQT national championships:

NAQT may decline to issue, rescind, or attach additional conditions to an invitation, if it finds that one of more of the recipient school’s players, coaches, or other affiliates engaged in conduct inconsistent with Section K of the Official NAQT Rules. This may be applied to conduct that occurred at quiz bowl tournaments (regardless of whether the tournaments used the Official NAQT Rules and/or NAQT questions) or outside of tournaments.

In the definition of Small School (used for qualification for the Small School National Championship Tournament), we eliminated references to average daily membership because it is defined differently by different states and not at all by other states. We use total enrollment numbers in all cases.