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UrinalCake
01-11-2019, 11:25 AM
As referenced in the latest DBR podcast episode, the trivia quiz given to potential K-ville tenters has been released. I plan on taking this over my lunch break. How did you do?

link (https://www.scribd.com/document/397225528/Tenting-Trivia-Quiz-2019)

dukelifer
01-11-2019, 11:53 AM
As referenced in the latest DBR podcast episode, the trivia quiz given to potential K-ville tenters has been released. I plan on taking this over my lunch break. How did you do?

link (https://www.scribd.com/document/397225528/Tenting-Trivia-Quiz-2019)

100%- I routinely know the game stats for all players -like Question 11

How many points, blocks, and rebounds did Marques Bolden have against Auburn?

Who doesn't have that info in their heads?

94duke
01-11-2019, 12:08 PM
Wait, do you have to take a quiz to camp out for games?

scottdude8
01-11-2019, 12:28 PM
Ummm... if I was tenting and that was the quiz I was given without any heads-up I'd be more than a little mad. Back when we were tenting the questions were more reasonable assessments of how big of a fan you were (i.e. all the players names/numbers/hometowns, some personal tidbits, important Duke BB history like all of the retired numbers, what are the words to our fight song, etc.). Asking little details like "how many points exactly did X score in Y game" doesn't measure how big of a Duke fan you are, it measures your ability to memorize stuff!

All that said, if the Line Monitors let the tenters know in advance that this was more or less what would be covered on the quiz, this is less problematic (then you can make the argument that the tents that really wanted front of the line status would put in the time to study that, probably at the expense of their real classwork, haha). However, if those type of questions came up out of the blue I would personally be more than a little ticked off, as none of my study time would have gone towards that type of stuff!

I've always thought there was an easy solution to this tenting issue that kills two birds with one stone: keep track of student attendance at all games, particularly the early season ones that are typically more sparsely attended by students, and prioritize the tents by their attendance and how early they got in line for each game up until tenting begins. If the goal is to reward the fans that are truly engaged and dedicated to Duke BB wouldn't that be the easiest way to do it?

BD80
01-11-2019, 12:34 PM
I always wondered where the tenters relieved themselves now that the whole process has been regulated to the 12th decimal.



Ohhh. Quiz. With a "Q".



Never mind.

UrinalCake
01-11-2019, 12:42 PM
I don’t think they expect people to get 100% of them right. The point is for the test to be hard so that the more knowledgeable fans can be identified, if it was easy and everyone got a 100 then there would be no point.

There is an argument to be made that memorizing obscure facts has little correlation to how dedicated a fan you are or how likely you are to cheer hard at the game. (IMO the goal should be to fill the stadium with fans who will be the loudest, craziest, and most supportive).

Also I do think there have been incentives in the past for attending other non-revenue sporting events, like you earn the right to miss a tent check. But students would just check in at those events and then leave once they got their pass, so it kind of defeated the purpose.

Bluedog
01-11-2019, 12:48 PM
Wait, do you have to take a quiz to camp out for games?

They do it to decide the order. The signup online was filled up for black tenting within 4 minutes. Based on safety concerns, they don't want people tenting over winter break so open it up as students get back.

dukelifer
01-11-2019, 12:52 PM
I don’t think they expect people to get 100% of them right. The point is for the test to be hard so that the more knowledgeable fans can be identified, if it was easy and everyone got a 100 then there would be no point.

There is an argument to be made that memorizing obscure facts has little correlation to how dedicated a fan you are or how likely you are to cheer hard at the game. (IMO the goal should be to fill the stadium with fans who will be the loudest, craziest, and most supportive).

Also I do think there have been incentives in the past for attending other non-revenue sporting events, like you earn the right to miss a tent check. But students would just check in at those events and then leave once they got their pass, so it kind of defeated the purpose.

It was clearly hard. There is a strategy for this kind of test-as you have different members responsible for specific parts of the test- so 12 people as a collective attempt to answer- but some questions do tend to focus on minutia. Still it is probably as fair as any method. I think they knew what to expect.

scottdude8
01-11-2019, 01:14 PM
It was clearly hard. There is a strategy for this kind of test-as you have different members responsible for specific parts of the test- so 12 people as a collective attempt to answer- but some questions do tend to focus on minutia. Still it is probably as fair as any method. I think they knew what to expect.

The bolded point above is super important. If the tenters knew that questions of the type "how many points did X score against Y" would be on the test, then fine. It's still not a great way to determine the order (I still maintain there's no reason not to do it based off of attendance/time spent in line for early season blowout games), but it's at lest fair. But if all the tenters were told was that there'd be a quiz about Duke Basketball (which was more or less all we were told when this happened during my tenting tenure), then this is ridiculous. As a group we made sure we knew the hometowns of every player, the details of every coach, every retired number, every Final Four year, etc. We NEVER would've thought to spend any time memorizing banal statistics like they asked. If these were the type of questions I got with no reason to expect them, I would've been mad.

With all that said I'm very interested to hear (perhaps from a current student?) what the actual context of this quiz was. IMHO this is in no way the best way to determine tent order, but there's one situation in which it's at least reasonable, and another in which it's laughably random and unfair. The context is key and I don't think we can assume anything one way or the other.

UrinalCake
01-11-2019, 01:20 PM
As a group we made sure we knew the hometowns of every player, the details of every coach, every retired number, every Final Four year, etc. We NEVER would've thought to spend any time memorizing banal statistics like they asked. If these were the type of questions I got with no reason to expect them, I would've been mad.

But they can't just ask the same questions every year, because then everyone would know to memorize those things. They have to change it up to keep you on your toes, and hopefully benefit people who already know a lot about Duke and not the people who crammed it into their heads just for the test.

UrinalCake
01-11-2019, 01:24 PM
BTW I think there should be a physical challenge component of this test, to determine the fans who are most ready for the demands of attending the UNC game. It could have events such as

- standing on the balls of your feet for three straight hours
- covering yourself in paint and then standing in the cold without a shirt all afternoon/evening
- having multiple people invade your personal space, and enduring the odors involved
- screaming without losing your voice
- going from 20 degree weather to 90 and back, without wearing a jacket because there's nowhere to put it

scottdude8
01-11-2019, 01:27 PM
But they can't just ask the same questions every year, because then everyone would know to memorize those things. They have to change it up to keep you on your toes, and hopefully benefit people who already know a lot about Duke and not the people who crammed it into their heads just for the test.

True... but the team also changes every year, so a lot of the questions naturally change in that form. I also think that there are ways to be creative and write questions that only a real Duke fan would know (like some arcane details of K's history, or the roots of the program before K, or something like that) that you could go to before these statistical minutia questions.

All that said, I think we're debating something that doesn't even need to be debated if they would just do the smart thing and eliminate the quiz all together... and the fact that we're having to debate the reasonableness of the quiz in any fashion only serves as evidence of that point, does it not?

scottdude8
01-11-2019, 01:30 PM
BTW I think there should be a physical challenge component of this test, to determine the fans who are most ready for the demands of attending the UNC game. It could have events such as

- standing on the balls of your feet for three straight hours
- covering yourself in paint and then standing in the cold without a shirt all afternoon/evening
- having multiple people invade your personal space, and enduring the odors involved
- screaming without losing your voice
- going from 20 degree weather to 90 and back, without wearing a jacket because there's nowhere to put it

I absolutely despise Michigan State for obvious reasons, but apparently to get optimal seats in their student section (I was going to type its name but I had to withhold vomit even thinking about it, so I'll move on) you actually have to attend a tryout which involves knowing the chants, seeing how loud you can scream while jumping, etc. Now, MSU students spend so little time in class that they can dedicate time to doing this for a couple thousand entrants (haha) so this is probably a bit unreasonable for Duke students. But believe it or not it isn't as outlandish as I think you meant for it to sound!

dukelifer
01-11-2019, 02:05 PM
The bolded point above is super important. If the tenters knew that questions of the type "how many points did X score against Y" would be on the test, then fine. It's still not a great way to determine the order (I still maintain there's no reason not to do it based off of attendance/time spent in line for early season blowout games), but it's at lest fair. But if all the tenters were told was that there'd be a quiz about Duke Basketball (which was more or less all we were told when this happened during my tenting tenure), then this is ridiculous. As a group we made sure we knew the hometowns of every player, the details of every coach, every retired number, every Final Four year, etc. We NEVER would've thought to spend any time memorizing banal statistics like they asked. If these were the type of questions I got with no reason to expect them, I would've been mad.

With all that said I'm very interested to hear (perhaps from a current student?) what the actual context of this quiz was. IMHO this is in no way the best way to determine tent order, but there's one situation in which it's at least reasonable, and another in which it's laughably random and unfair. The context is key and I don't think we can assume anything one way or the other.

They did not know the questions but the type of questions. They knew that they might have to recite players stats from a game or the season. That said- if you divide the labor- you can probably figure some questions out- some you just had to know like -In a recent interview with MSN Sports, to what heavy machinery did Javin compare Zion? .

scottdude8
01-11-2019, 02:29 PM
They did not know the questions but the type of questions. They knew that they might have to recite players stats from a game or the season. That said- if you divide the labor- you can probably figure some questions out- some you just had to know like -In a recent interview with MSN Sports, to what heavy machinery did Javin compare Zion? .

Gotcha, thanks! If that's the case then I withdraw my specific complaint about the quiz (that the questions weren't reasonable), but maintain my general one (that this is a silly way to decide tenting order).

CrazyNotCrazie
01-11-2019, 03:08 PM
As others have stated, I do not equate memorizing statistics with being a super fan. I think the questions in the miscellaneous section were by far the most interesting and appropriate. I think it is crazy that there are few if any questions about Duke basketball history. That to me determines the true fans. At least ask them to name the retired jerseys or something like that. But a super fan should also be able to know whether the alum sitting behind the bench looks more like Bobby Hurley or Elton Brand.

What is to prevent the tenters from just looking all of this up on their phones? A lot of the statistical info is extremely easy to find, and I assume they can't confiscate all phones/laptops/etc.

fuse
01-11-2019, 03:50 PM
A better system might be tradable (with undergrad student ID) game allocations.

Let the students who don’t care give away their allotment (or barter for something they value), and let the undergrad Crazies who really want to be there get easy entry for their allotment, and have to get creative on how they get other students’ allotments.

You could start with an opt in approach to narrow down the pool to only undergrads who are interested in supporting the team.

If they are already scanning student IDs, you could weight allocations for sophomore through senior classes based on prior attendance or trades.

I get that tenting is an experience.
Tenting was started (presumably) because there was no better way to prove your fandom than by spending time outside Cameron or kowtowing to power hungry line monitors by answering asinine quizes.

It would be better to focus on the problem (how to get as many students as want to attend games to do so up to capacity) than thinking the existing methodology is the best way.

Native
01-11-2019, 04:34 PM
Since the administration imposed a hard start date on tenting — way back in the mid-2000s, IIRC — the problem of figuring out who's first in line out of all the tents that started exactly at the beginning has been an open question.

The system may have changed since I was HLM in 2014-15, but we tracked attendance at other winter sporting events as the first way to rank all of the tents who started on the first day of tenting. This is how it was done for the entirety of my tenure at Duke and at least in the two seasons afterward.

The purpose of this quiz is really to break ties more than anything. I believe that the reason the quiz has blown up in recent seasons is that K-Ville fills almost 100% to capacity within the first day or so of Black tenting, so it needs to be so difficult as to be almost random as a way to accomplish this.


I get that tenting is an experience.
Tenting was started (presumably) because there was no better way to prove your fandom than by spending time outside Cameron or kowtowing to power hungry line monitors by answering asinine quizes.

It would be better to focus on the problem (how to get as many students as want to attend games to do so up to capacity) than thinking the existing methodology is the best way.

Part of the problem is that students only want to attend one game: the Carolina game, precisely because it's part of the experience. They don't care about playing the Durham Family YMCA on a Tuesday night. You kind of have to treat the Carolina game separate from every other game on the slate since the demand is so high. As much as we bemoan the attendance issues in recent seasons, there has never been anything remotely close to a problem to filling the stands for Carolina. I agree that general attendance is absolutely a problem, but it's not 100% relevant in this context since we're discussing tenting, which is for the Carolina game only.

84Duke
01-12-2019, 06:26 AM
You could just wake up hungover, put a 12 pack in a cooler, and go stand in line for 7 hours like a normal person.

Indoor66
01-12-2019, 08:48 AM
Tenting has jumped the shark.

uh_no
01-12-2019, 09:50 AM
You could just wake up hungover, put a 12 pack in a cooler, and go stand in line for 7 hours like a normal person.

Not when there are 1600 people willing to wait in line for 8.

OldPhiKap
01-12-2019, 09:54 AM
Tenting has jumped the shark.

They should put that on a cheer sheet

knicknut
01-12-2019, 10:50 AM
Since the administration imposed a hard start date on tenting — way back in the mid-2000s, IIRC — the problem of figuring out who's first in line out of all the tents that started exactly at the beginning has been an open question.

The system may have changed since I was HLM in 2014-15, but we tracked attendance at other winter sporting events as the first way to rank all of the tents who started on the first day of tenting. This is how it was done for the entirety of my tenure at Duke and at least in the two seasons afterward.

The purpose of this quiz is really to break ties more than anything. I believe that the reason the quiz has blown up in recent seasons is that K-Ville fills almost 100% to capacity within the first day or so of Black tenting, so it needs to be so difficult as to be almost random as a way to accomplish this.



Part of the problem is that students only want to attend one game: the Carolina game, precisely because it's part of the experience. They don't care about playing the Durham Family YMCA on a Tuesday night. You kind of have to treat the Carolina game separate from every other game on the slate since the demand is so high. As much as we bemoan the attendance issues in recent seasons, there has never been anything remotely close to a problem to filling the stands for Carolina. I agree that general attendance is absolutely a problem, but it's not 100% relevant in this context since we're discussing tenting, which is for the Carolina game only.

Why does it have to be treated differently? Why submit to the part of the fanbase that isn't really fans?

In four years on campus, I attended all but three games that took place with school in session -- two UNC games in which I couldn't get in a tent with a spot, and one Miami game on a senior day where the football department also took a chunk of the student section for recruits, so almost no non-seniors were admitted. Every Tuesday night 9pm Clemson game during midterms or December game against the Durham YMCA, I was there. It will never seem fair to me that students for whom UNC was the only game they attended (because it was the "thing to do") were able to win priority, just because their tent happened to have people stationed closer to the random location of the line monitor (the methodology when I was there). Knowing things about the team, even arcane statistics, is an improvement, but attendence seems like the obvious and practical solution, for all stages of tenting (or even the walk-up line for those still left out).

gvtucker
01-12-2019, 03:41 PM
FWIW, this quiz does not determine the order in line. It is only used to see who is allowed into the black tenting cutoff.

The test to determine order will be later on, closer to the UNC game.

84Duke
01-12-2019, 04:38 PM
Not when there are 1600 people willing to wait in line for 8.

Yeah, I was being facetious there. I waited in a tent once (Washington w/Detlef Schrempf, 1985) - and I wasn’t a student that year. You waited to get the best seats, but in that time it was very very rare to not be able to get in at all.

scottdude8
01-15-2019, 11:06 AM
FWIW, this bothered me so much (and I had enough free time on my hands this weekend, haha) that I wrote a Letter to the Editor to The Chronicle. That also allowed me to make my point a bit more eloquently than in off the cuff forum posts, lol. You can find it here (https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2019/01/duke-university-basketball-letter-tenting-trivia-test-is-ridiculous) if interested.

JasonEvans
01-15-2019, 02:37 PM
FWIW, this bothered me so much (and I had enough free time on my hands this weekend, haha) that I wrote a Letter to the Editor to The Chronicle. That also allowed me to make my point a bit more eloquently than in off the cuff forum posts, lol. You can find it here (https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2019/01/duke-university-basketball-letter-tenting-trivia-test-is-ridiculous) if interested.

Well done, Scott. I agree with every word you wrote!

scottdude8
01-15-2019, 02:57 PM
Well done, Scott. I agree with every word you wrote!

Thanks Jason, much appreciated!

dukelifer
01-15-2019, 03:25 PM
Thanks Jason, much appreciated!

Somehow in the old days- we managed to get into games by just standing in line- and that was before having a computing device in your pocket to get work done or stay connected. Somehow we found a way and the student section - which was the entire set of bleachers- was full, very rowdy and spontaneously disruptive. You haven't had a real Cameron experience unless you had seats behind the opposing bench and yelled so loud through the time-outs, that Dean Smith would glare back at you.

House P
01-15-2019, 05:09 PM
Asking little details like "how many points exactly did X score in Y game" doesn't measure how big of a Duke fan you are, it measures your ability to memorize stuff!


My "favorite" question:


What is our most watched game this season? How many viewers tuned in? (1 point for the game, 1 point for the number of viewers, to the nearest ten thousand).

The first part is a reasonable question. I assume the answer is the Kentucky game.

However, I would guess that even awhom111, the keeper of the DBR TV Ratings thread and someone who probably knows more about Duke's TV ratings than 99.99% of the Duke fanbase, can't answer the second part of this question to the nearest ten thousand viewers!!!

Forcing tenters to memorize a bunch of mostly arbitrary stats/figures is silly. Clearly, the best way is to determine entry to the Duke-UNC game is based on the number of hours spent on the DBR forum!

KBCrazie
01-19-2022, 11:41 PM
Somehow in the old days- we managed to get into games by just standing in line- and that was before having a computing device in your pocket to get work done or stay connected. Somehow we found a way and the student section - which was the entire set of bleachers- was full, very rowdy and spontaneously disruptive. You haven't had a real Cameron experience unless you had seats behind the opposing bench and yelled so loud through the time-outs, that Dean Smith would glare back at you.

Does anyone remember BOG and the "Buffer Zone"?