What We Are
It's Academic is another name for Quizbowl. It's somewhat similar to Jeopardy, but the descriptions are read as questions and are called tossups, and you don't phrase your answer as a question (for example, if the correct answer is A, you don't say "What is A?" when you buzz in, you just say "A"). It's a team game, typically with two teams of 4 people each playing. Each player has a buzzer (usually a push button) and can buzz in at any point during the reading of the question. The point of this is that in certain Quizbowl formats, you can get bonus points for answering correctly early. However, you can also get penalized for answering early and getting it wrong (this is called negging). If one team answers the question correctly, the moderator reads a bonus to that team. Bonuses usually come in groups of 3 questions each, with each one worth the same amount as a tossup. Each part of the bonus usually relates to the others- for example, a bonus might ask you to identify some of the characters from a play.
Unlike most academic teams (coughMathTeam/PhysicsOlympiad/BioOlympiad/ComputerTeam/OceanBowl/etc.), Quizbowl covers a wide range of subjects. These include history, math, literature, biology, geography, chemistry, physics, computer science, religion (ancient and modern), philosophy, mythology...pretty much anything you can think of. Even pop culture has a niche in Quizbowl- so we can say that it's the only competition in which players are expected to have at least SOME knowledge of current events (questions on popular Internet phenomenons, sports, TV shows, and modern music have been asked before, and fairly often).
Honestly, Quizbowl is the only activity in the school that rewards people for having a wide range of knowledge about different subjects, and to a certain extent it rewards those who like history and literature more than most other activities at TJ. We're going to have a high number of seniors graduating, so if you join up and keep up with the club, you may very well end up on our B or C team (2nd or 3rd best) in your sophomore year, and possibly our A team (the one that wins all of those national championships) by your junior year, depending on how things go. There'll always be a place for you- we don't do cuts.
We also win a lot. We won the main national championship last year (called the High School National Championship Tournament, it's hosted by the National Academic Quiz Tournaments) and we finished a very close second in the other national championship (called the Partnership for Academic Competition Excellance National Scolastic Championship). We also were national champions in the HSNCT from 2003-2005 and 2008 and in the NSC in 2004, and our A team went undefeated throughout the 2005 season. We've won the state championship 8 of the 11 times it was offered- 1998, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008- and finished second in the other three years- 2000, 2003, 2007.
(Thanks to Michael Eng)
