Collegiate Novice Series
NAQT produces a Collegiate Novice Series of questions intended for use at tournaments catering to newer and more casual players. These packet sets are a spiritual descendant of the series of (Early Autumn) Collegiate Novice tournament sets previously edited by Andrew Hart and, in fact, Andrew will be playing a major editorial role in their production now that he is a member of NAQT.
The difficulty of Collegiate Novice is slightly below that of the Division II Sectional Championship Tournament questions.
As part of making this series available, NAQT will also be embarking on a marketing campaign to entice more colleges and universities to get involved with quiz bowl. We hope to have many interested hosts, as we anticipate that a nearby tournament will make it more likely for a school to give the activity a try!
NAQT does not have a formal exclusivity policy for these events (as we have for high school), but may reject potential hosts that are too close to schools that have already set up a tournament.
The sets will be derived from Invitational Series packet sets, with new questions being written to fit NAQT’s collegiate distribution (and to replace material that is only appropriate for high schoolers). In particular, Collegiate Novice sets will not contain computation questions. Teams hosting high school tournaments using either base set should be aware of this relationship: They may not be able to attend a competition using a Collegiate Novice Series if they have already hosted their own event on (and thus been exposed to much of the content in) an Invitational Series packet set with the same number. Of course, there is no problem with attending a novice tournament and then hosting a high school event on the corresponding Invitational Series.
Institutions interested in hosting Collegiate Novice events may submit a tournament proposal online or contact us at hosting@naqt.com to reserve a set. The cost is an $85 base fee plus $17 per team in attendance, with a $50 rebate available for sending appropriate results after the tournament.
We maintain an extensive contact list for established programs and potential players at schools without formal teams and are happy to share the list with schools running tournaments to help them recruit the largest possible field and get new people and schools involved with quiz bowl.
The Collegiate Novice Series packet sets are not available for high school tournaments, but prospective hosts of high school tournaments are encouraged to host tournaments on corresponding Invitational Series packet sets.