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CBQ Rules Changes for 2024-2025

My goal in this document is ultimately to convey upcoming Christian Bible Quizzing (CBQ) rules changes that will go into effect for the 2024-2025 regional season and beyond. To help explain and provide clear justification for the changes, I’ll first examine some of the experience and feedback that encouraged consideration of the rules changes. (Feel free to skip to the rules changes if you’d like.)

These changes are the result of discussions and deliberations following experience and feedback from participants in CBQ’s International Open Championships (IOC) 2023 and the 2023-2024 season in the Pacific Northwest (PNW) Quizzing region. While source feedback was in many cases anecdotal, it’s never the less meaningful and useful; and where possible, I used objective statistical analysis to confirm observations. Feedback came from a variety of folks and covered a range of concepts, but a central initiating theme was around observations of open book at regional meets, specifically PNW Quizzing meets. So I’ll start by digging into the background of open book.

Purpose of Open Book

The purpose of open book is to advance the mission of Bible Quizzing, which is to encourage the most people to memorize the most verses of Scripture, over the long-term. It’s designed to boost point participation at the lower levels of competition and with early-stage quizzers in hopes that this participation will spark a desire to invest more in preparation prior to the next meet, which leads to increased memorization.

Open book lowers the barrier to entry for recruiting would-be new quizzers into the ranks of participating quizzers. With open book, there’s effectively zero required up-front investment before initial participation. A would-be quizzer technically doesn’t need to invest at all before participating on a team in a meet. Certainly, first-time participants at a meet would do well to memorize some verses or at least have some familiarity with the material, but this is not strictly required to play a small role in support of their team.

With open book, quizzers get engaged earlier in the ramp-up process as they move from rookies to veterans.

Open book encourages an outcome of every quizzer participating at least to some degree at every meet. In principle, every quizzer could earn a point. At lower-levels of competition, open book theoretically eliminates or at least reduces the number of quizzes where a majority of the queries are left as no-triggers. These sorts of quizzes are demotivating and frankly boring for most, and therefore counter-missional over the long-term.

Regional Leadership Discussion

In the PNW Quizzing region’s 2023-2024 season, coaches and officials noted several outcomes related to open book, some positive and others unfortunate. Near the end of our season, leadership discussed their open book observations. Here’s a summary:

Problems with the Current Rules

The open book subsystem has the potential in the short-range (in a single-query analysis) to lead to counter-missional outcomes with Quote base subtype queries. As an example, let’s say there’s a theoretical quizzer who memorizes a random set of 50% of the verses perfectly with references and another who memorizes nothing but uses open book perfectly. On a single Quote query, the open book quizzer will always out-trigger the memorizing quizzer because the open book quizzer can trigger on anticipated reference pronunciation uniqueness whereas the memorizing quizzer must consider if the verse of the query is in the set they memorized.

Consider a quizzer who memorizes 100% of the material perfectly with references. Such a quizzer is currently incentivized to decline Quote queries so an open book quizzer on their team can pick up a base point and earn additional team bonus points. But even if there are no open book quizzers on the memorizer’s team, the memorizer is incentivized to decline Quote queries due to the maximum possible points earnable via Quote queries is 6, whereas the maximum from all other types is 7. Also, when competing against teams with open book quizzers on Quote queries, the 100%-memorized quizzer has to engage a higher risk to win the trigger than on any other base subtype.

Unrelated to query base subtypes, it’s possible, though probabilistically unlikely, that a team can exclusively leverage open book to defeat another team that’s answering synonymously due to team bonus points. (While unlikely, this actually happened in a quiz at PNW Quizzing’s District Championships.) Open book quizzers can leverage team bonus points more effectively than partial-material memorizers because they can more easily target sequential queries. As an overly simplistic example of the math, consider a 2-team quiz between a tactically perfect open book team versus a team that’s memorized 50% of the material in an idealized quiz. The open book team can earn 9 points, but the memorizing team can only earn 4 to 6.

One coach observed that it felt silly that quizzers can earn points without any study at all, which to that coach didn’t “feel like Bible Quizzing”. A coach shared that one of her quizzers decided to study less because they can still earn points in a meet via use of open book. And there were anecdotal reports that toward the end of the season there were some capable PNW Quizzing quizzers who were relying on open book as a crutch instead of investing time in review.

Reasons to Avoid Changing Rules (or to Keep Changes Minimal)

Examining objective statistics comparing the 2023-2024 season PNW Quizzing season to the immediately previous season, prior to open book adoption, there’s a significant increase in the participation of quizzers in the lower-half of ranked average scores. Non-participation prior to open book adoption was over 25%, whereas after adoption all but 2 quizzers participated. Moreover, we’ve seen a small but trending increase in scoring over the course of the past season across lower half of ranked participants, suggesting that initial open book participation is a catalyst to increased memorization, although to a small degree.

In the auxiliary quizzes at regional meets, a majority of queries are attempted. In other words, majority no-trigger quizzes no longer routinely happen.

Given that we only have 1 full season of data from a single regional Quizzing association that is admittedly weak relative to other nearby regional associations and even itself from past seasons, any conclusions should be held with at least some suspicion until future data becomes available. There’s limited data right now for irrefutable analysis.

Since this was the first season following PNW Quizzing adoption of the CBQ system, many coaches likely didn’t feel as comfortable and knowledgeable about the most effective ways to evoke missional outcomes in all their quizzers. As an example, there were coaches who directed their quizzers to respond open book any time a quizzer was unsure of responding synonymously correctly, in order to earn 1 point versus 0. This strategy may be momentarily useful for low-ranked quizzers, but it’s severely points-limiting for teams comprised of even mid-ranked quizzers. A better long-term strategy is usually to attempt synonymous and accept any errors. Compared with other Quizzing systems, CBQ offers significantly greater depth of strategic options. As coaches gain more experience with CBQ, they’ll be able to leverage ever more effective strategies.

However, most compelling for me were the stories from several coaches of how the open book component of CBQ resulted in many of their initially low-ranked and/or rookie quizzers engaging more rapidly with Quizzing and deciding to invest more in memorizing. There were rookie quizzers who started off in the first meet of the season having memorized little to no material who succeeded by the end of the season in memorizing large portions of material. Their scores reflect this growth.

Considerations

There were several other considerations I took into account whilst deliberating on a change decision. First, while experiences with open book Quote queries were the initiators of this topic, many of the same issues will apply to Finish queries once there’s wide-spread adoption of list making reference materials. Therefore, a solution that only addresses open book Quote queries would be short-sighted.

Given a material reference created that sorts material alphabetically rather than by reference, any quizzer could reliably and effectively respond to open book Finish queries without any investment in memorization. That said, there’ll still be a fundamental difference between Quote and Finish queries. As mentioned before, a 50% material memorizer should, but only on a single-query basis, be defeated on trigger speed by an open book non-memorizer, assuming an ideal 1-on-1 contest. However, with Finish queries, a partial material memorizer should be able to typically defeat an open book non-memorizer on trigger speed due to faster speed of recognizing prompt uniqueness. (Chapter reference and Phrase queries can be also be open-booked with list work, but to leverage that work against a quizzer who memorized verses would require aggressive real study time, and it would therefore be strategically wiser to just memorize instead.)

An important part of the open book subsystem is its severe limitations to points earning potential. A purely open-book quizzer will max out at 2 personal points, which a single correct synonymous response will earn whilst maintaining the potential to go on to earn as many as 21 additional personal points. This extreme points earning potential delta was intended as a device to encourage open-book quizzers to quickly move on to more investing in memorizing and thereby greater points earnings and higher rankings. For many quizzers, that seems to have worked; however, for other quizzers, it seems points and rankings aren’t sufficiently motivational. For these other quizzers, it seems just having the opportunity to be counted correct is what’s motivating.

Lastly but possible most importantly, I want to generally caution against adding rules or using rules patches to cover over what should really be solved with coaching. Rule sets patched in this way tend over time to become bloated, complex, prone to misunderstanding, and eventually replete with inconsistencies and other errors. For example, we all desire for Godly behavior from all at meets and throughout Bible Quizzing; however, to attempt to patch the rule book for every case of human failing would be an endless and ineffectual endeavor.

Coaching

The rules are the minimum, not the maximum, of what’s possible to coach. While the rules establish the landscape through which strategies flow, it’s the coaches in collaboration with their quizzers who identify, train, and execute strategies. Coaches can and should, within the wide confines of the rules, direct their teams however they feel would best optimize positive missional outcomes.

For example, a coach could decide to restrict all open book responses for their teams, which in some specific cases would tend to improve team scores even initially and in most cases over time. Or a coach could decide to allow open book only for rookies and/or only on some query base subtypes. Coaches can set policies and practices for their teams within the broad boundaries of the rules. And coaches can cause a quizzer to sit out a quiz for failing to follow instructions. Coaches have an awesome responsibility, being one of the most influential sources for improving missional outcomes from their quizzers, and therefore they should substantial authority to govern their teams in detail.

Rules Changes

The following are the rule changes that will go into effect for the 2024-2025 regional season and beyond.

Reference Materials and Review Tools

With these rules changes coming into effect, classic Bible references (open book material references where verses are sorted in verse order) are no longer effective tools to leverage the open book subtype. Instead, reference materials with verses sorted alphabetically or verses by multi-word unique phrase by chapter are more useful. A quizzer’s and team’s strategy will influence what reference materials are best built. Constructing these custom reference materials manually requires a significant investment; and since the goal of open book is to reduce up-front investment, it’s necessary to provide a means by which coaches, quizzers, and parents can quickly and easily build custom.

Therefore, as of now, QuizSage provides a “Reference Generator” to generate custom reference materials. At the moment, the output is suitable for printing in either direct or scaled output to a wide variety of page sizes. In the not-too-distant future, my hope is to add the ability to order spiral-bound books using the QuizSage tool.

To assist coaches and quizzers in general with pushing toward ever more and better memorization, QuizSage also, as of now, a suite of memorization tools and utilities. Quizzers can use QuizSage to track their initial verse memorization, conduct review of verses they’ve memorized from a variety of vectors, and report on their memory state. Quizzer can also share their memory state report with their coach and other quizzers for improved accountability and collaborative encouragement.