National Academic Quiz Tournaments

Company type	Limited liability company
Industry	Quiz bowl
Headquarters	Shawnee, Kansas Twin Cities, Minnesota , United States
Key people	Seth Teitler (President) Jonah Greenthal (Vice President for Operations) Jeff Hoppes (Vice President for Communication) Chad Kubicek (Chief Financial Officer) Jason Thompson (Chief Editor)[1]
Services	Question writing, tournament organizing
Website	naqt.com/

National Academic Quiz Tournaments, LLC is a question-writing and quiz bowl tournament-organizing company founded by former players in 1996. It is unique among U.S. quiz organizations for supplying questions and hosting championships at the middle school, high school, and college levels. NAQT operates out of Shawnee, Kansas and Minneapolis–Saint Paul.

The company mostly writes practice questions and questions for high school and middle school invitational tournaments, as well as for some game shows. Its involvement in college quiz bowl is mostly restricted to sectional tournaments and the Intercollegiate Championship Tournament.

Rules

NAQT's rules are quite similar to other quiz bowl tournament's rules. These are about qualification, packets, and gameplay.

Qualification

To qualify for the MSNCT or HSNCT, a team from a school must get certain place depending on pool size, or teams playing. A school can get more teams also depending on pool size. The events which you must qualify at must be organized and accepted and using NAQT packets.

Packets

NAQT creates their own packets for tournaments along for studying, such as specific subject, lightning rounds, Thumbs Up! and more. They consist of 24 tossups and 24 bonuses. For certain packets, tossups and bonuses are on the same page, but for HSNCT, MSNCT, and SSNCT, the tossups and bonuses are on separate pages. They consist of clues that become easier and end in 'For 10 points'. They will also provide pronunciation on certain words and provide what to accept, prompt, or say is incorrect.

Gameplay

The rules about negs and powers are that negs give -5, but if another team interrupts and gets it wrong, it is a 0. Correct answers before the power mark, or (*), give 15 points. Protests can be made at timeouts, halftime, or the end of the game. If a player answers incorrectly, their team is locked for the tossup. Bounce-backs are not allowed. Timeouts can be called at the very beginning of any tossup, but a team is limited to 1 tossup per match. A score-check is allowed during the timeouts and halftime.

At the college level

The ICT is divided into divisions, unlike ACF Nationals, so that a clear undergraduate champion is determined (all formats allow graduate students to compete in some form).

Collegiate divisions

Division I Overall

NAQT's eligibility rules state that any student taking at least three credit hours towards a degree at a university may compete on that university's team, and indeed may not compete independently if such a team exists. If no program exists at their university's campus, they may compete on the team for another campus of the same university, with the provision that they must leave that team should their home campus organize a program.

If any member of the team has an undergraduate degree, the team competes in the Division I competition, and is only eligible for the open championship (i.e. the overall championship).

Division I Undergraduate

At Sectional Championship Tournaments (SCTs) and the Intercollegiate Championship Tournament (ICT), teams that do not meet the Division II requirements play together. However, awards are given, including bids to the ICT, for the top undergraduate team. A team is eligible for the undergraduate championship if all members of the team are undergraduate students, and none of them have played in four years of NAQT collegiate competition prior to the current year. The undergraduate championship was first awarded in 1998.^[2]

Division II

Also introduced in 1998, Division II is intended to give first- and second-year students an opportunity to compete against other players and teams of the same level of experience. The rules of Division II eligibility are that one must be eligible for DI Undergraduate (i.e. no degree, and less than four years of experience), and in no year prior qualified for or participated in ICT.^[3]

Exceptions to the eligibility rules have been granted to deal with special circumstances in past years; however, as they are controversial when they occur, they do not occur often.

Community colleges

Two-year colleges usually compete in separate SCTs each February (it is permitted, but rare, for teams from these schools to compete in DI). Eight teams qualify for the Division II ICT, where they compete alongside other DII teams in a manner analogous to that of DI Undergraduate teams. However, students at two-year colleges are exempt from the DII eligibility restrictions. In fact, they have three years of eligibility at the DII level.^[4]

Winners of NAQT Intercollegiate Championship Tournament ^[5]5">edit

Notes

At the high school leveledit

Teams qualify to the High School National Championship Tournament through a variety of methods. Most commonly, a team qualifies by finishing in the top 15% of the field at a tournament that uses NAQT questions. If a school wants to send more than one team to nationals, the school must qualify all said teams at the same time during a single tournament.

The small school award is given to a public school with a non-selective admissions policy and less than 500 students in grades 10 through 12. Up until and including 2013, the small school champion was decided on a playoff between top finishing teams at the High School National Championship Tournament. Since 2014, a separate national championship tournament has been held for small schools.

Winners of NAQT High School National Championship Tournamentedit

The winners of the NAQT High School National Championship Tournament:^[7]