Advice for transitioning into college quizbowl:

Welcome to Duke Quiz Bowl! Whether you're new to quizbowl entirely or have experience from playing quizbowl in high school, quizbowl at the college level can seem challenging; however, remember that you are playing on a team and that no one knows everything. Nor is everyone expected to know everything!

Even if it's not your goal to be a competitive quizbowl player, you are more than welcome to study to improve. However, in the end, it’s up to you how you want to handle the knowledge encompassed in the college quizbowl canon. No one in our club is ever pressured to study, so if you want to come to practices and tournaments just for fun, that’s totally fine and you're more than welcome to do that!

If you want to do some extra studying, our biggest advice is to study what you’re interested in and make that something you actively enjoy. You will be doing enough studying through your classes, and there are other ways that you'll very likely improve at quizbowl even without doing extra studying just for subject coverage.

• As you hear more questions, you’ll probably start to recognize many popular clues/answerlines in college quizbowl, and it's highly likely that you’ll improve just based on increasing exposure to them.

• The knowledge that you learn in your classes as you go through college also often translates very well into quizbowl.

Useful links and methods for improving:

College Quizbowl Packet Archive: An archive of packets from previous seasons that are posted online for teams and individual players to use for practice. Simply reviewing past packets is a common way to study, and ACF Fall and EFT are especially good lower/intro-level difficulty sets for starting out. (If you’re interested in higher-difficulty sets, ACF Regionals is the annual qualifier for ACF Nationals).

AseemsDB is a comprehensive database in which you can search if a particular phrase has ever shown up before in quizbowl, either in a question or as an answer. QuizDB is another such database.

The "Practice and Learn" section of NAQT's website has a handful of sample NAQT packets that you can look at (SCT and ICT (DI and DII) are their college sets), as well as frequency lists and "You Gotta Know" primers about various topics that are relevant quizbowl.

Flashcards are another popular tool; writing an answer on one side of the card and writing down common clues for it on the other side is another common way to study.

People also study by writing their own quizbowl questions; though it can be very intensive, it requires you to look up and order clues from hard to easy (for a tossup) or arrange them in easy, medium, and hard parts (for a bonus), and can be quite helpful.

Even reading books for fun can help you get better at quizbowl.