Many of you (in fact, probably all of you) may not have heard, but the quiz bowl community was rocked by a huge scandal recently when it was revealed that Andy Watkins, a key contributor on four national championship teams during his time at Harvard, had cheated at all four of those tournaments.
Let me give some background information so the above sentence makes sense. Quiz bowl is a game that tests academic knowledge in the most rigorous way possible while still being, you know, a game. Each match, played between two teams of up to four people each, consists of 20 tossup questions.
A tossup is a five-to-seven-line paragraph read aloud to both teams. Anyone on either team can buzz in at any time and say an answer. If they’re right, they’re awarded 10 points and their team is read a shorter three-part bonus question worth up to 30 points. Tossups are structured so the most obscure information about the answer is given first, then more well-known facts, leading to the easiest clues at the end.
For example, if there was a tossup about me, it would start out by saying, “This guy was once compared to Tim Tebow by a confused and angry Internet commenter,” then would end with a giveaway clue like, “Name this Alligator columnist who no one reads anymore because he’s crazy.”
You get the idea. At the highest levels of collegiate quiz bowl, the questions get tough. To be a good collegiate quiz bowl player requires hours upon hours of study. The reason people are willing to invest the time is not money or awesome prizes; the best prize I’ve ever gotten from a quiz bowl tournament was a sweet used copy of a bilingual edition of Pablo Neruda’s selected poetry.
No, people invest time and effort into quiz bowl tournaments because they like to learn. Quiz bowlers are an intellectually curious bunch. We’ll spend hours reading about the history of Australia on Wikipedia because we randomly hear about some Australian prime minister who shotgunned two and a half pints of beer in 11 seconds.
I guess “nerds” is an applicable term, but I prefer “intellectually curious” because the word “nerd” gives me ’Nam-like flashbacks to fourth-grade recess.
The reason this rocked the intellectually curious community is that it’s an absolutely senseless act of idiocy. Let me explain how he cheated. Andy had access to the website of the company (National Academic Quiz Tournaments — NAQT for short) that writes the questions for the national championship because NAQT runs a championship for high schoolers, and he was one of the editors of the high school questions. Being a smart guy, he was able to exploit a loophole in the servers to see the beginning clues of all the questions for the college championship. As you can imagine, this gave him a teensy competitive advantage over the other teams.
NAQT was recently reviewing its server logs after a much less clever player used the same loophole to very conspicuously cheat last year, and they uncovered a repeated pattern of access that would explain what quiz bowlers had previously described as “Andy’s NAQT boost.”
You see, people in quiz bowl know what others are capable of. They’d seen Andy play. His play at those national championships was suspiciously better than anything else he did at other tournaments. It was officially chalked up to “like, I dunno, really good coffee or whatever” and pushed out of mind. Now the quiz bowl world is half in shock, half blindly furious. Because, remember, there is no money involved. No scholarships. Very little prestige. The only thing at stake in a quiz bowl match is the match itself.
What Andy violated is the community: the people who played with and against him, the people who put money and time into learning things the hard way. And those people are angry because, let’s face it: Why would you cheat to win a game played for fun? Look, it all comes down to one simple truth: Cheating makes games not fun for people who don’t cheat. Don’t cheat! Duh! Everyone will hate you! And trust me, being hated gets old quick.
Dallin Kelson is an English senior at UF. His column runs on Mondays. You can contact him via opinions@alligator.org.
