Quiz Review : Rendezvous at IIT Delhi

Rendezvous , IIT Delhi's Fest was held from 24th-27th September. As part of the fest, there were 4 main quizzes ( Jeopardy, Sphinx, Kombat and Zoom-in ) as well as 4 theme based quizzes ( Movies, Sports, Lit and Fantasy and TV Shows ). Here is a report of the quizzes.

Jeopardy :

The quiz was hosted by Dr. Bhattacharya and Kunal Malhotra and saw a good mix of fairly easy as well as tough questions. The rules were such that the team that answered a question got to choose the next question ( upto a maximum of 3 times ) and this led to "scoring bursts" in the finals, where teams would sit idle for some time and then score 30-40 points in a burst, especially at the start of the quiz when the questions were easy. All agreed that the rules should be modified in the next edition to make the scoring a bit more evenly spread out in the quiz.

Sphinx :

Hosted by in-house quizzers, Sphinx was a decent quiz with a nice set of prelim questions. However, the same could not be said about the quizmasters, who made a no. of controversial decisions throughout the quiz. In the prelims, what exactly was reqd. as an answer was not specified explicitly on the slides, leading to some bit of confusion due to which a no. of teams lost marks for things they knew but did not write down. Also, one NSIT team had a question unchecked in their prelim sheet, which would have ensured that they qualified. When they came to the qm's to correct it, the qm's negated one of the their earlier corrected answers on the grounds of it not being worded correctly. This, I think, was a bit unethical to do.

In the finals, the qm's were openly partisan to all teams other than those who were leading the quiz. Whereas any of the answers sufficiently close to the actual answer was accepted from other teams, the leading teams were expected to give exact answers. This alone could be forgiven, but there were instances when the questions were modified impromptu to ensure that the leadng teams would not be able to give complete answers and would thus get only half points. Also, reversal of the infinite bounce order was not done at the half-way. That the eventual result of the quiz did not change despite all of the above was a thankful coincidence.

Kombat :

Arul Mani hosted Kombat, the open quiz. Though I did not attend it personally, from what I have heard, it was organised very professionally. Questions were a good mix of tough but interesting and workable questions.

Zoom In :

The quizmaster for Zoom In was thoroughly professional with the proceedings throughout. He was punctual and the quiz presentations were prepared well, without any glitches. The Quiz content too was pretty good and showed good effort on the part of the quizmaster. There were a couple of issues with the scoring though. I felt that the first round of identifying movie posters should not have had equal weightage as the rest of the questions. As a result, the team that scored the highest in this round remained in contention to win despite being the least scoring throughout the rest of the quiz. One of the questions was given more weightage than it deserved because teams answered it in part. A couple of decisions were controversial ( Quizmaster awarding points to a team when they said 'Code names for Unix,uh... Pass , er.... Ubuntu' whereas the answer was 'Code names for Ubuntu' ). At other times, teams were asked to explain their connects completely for points and not given any when they could not do so to the quizmaster's satisfaction.

The rest of the quizzes :

Were fairly decent and without too much incident. The TV Shows quiz saw a unique format where there were 6 categories and the individual toppers in each category as well as the overall 2 toppers went on into the finals.The Sports quiz too had a good set of questions. However, the quizzes were rather informal, some of the questions weren't well edited and some had to be scrapped because the answers were present in the questions itself.

All in all, Rendezvous was a mixed affair. There were more no. of quizzes, and a healthier participation in all quizzes. At the same time, not all quizzes could live upto the quality and professionalism generally seen in IIT's quizzes. I hope it will be better next year round.


PS : In an almost unnoticed incident, this blog has crossed the 100,000 mark !