one thing I will say going off of my experience playing in the high school national bee a few years ago and reading at euros last year, it gets less canonical in the IAC world as you go up in difficulty, the writers do love to add in geography/current events/art/literature and your occasional pop culture so being prepared for that, especially above competition who doesn’t study for that can make the difference in higher level matches
I figured as much as I read through and analyzed all the old national level questions that are publicly available.
I put the distributions into categories and looked at the “obscurity rate” of each category to get a rough idea of how many answers one would have to know to get close to 100% of what could be asked in that category. The result was a ratio of how many things to study to get a single correct answer (roughly)
One of the best ratios is “current world leaders” - it gets asked a LOT (almost once per 30 questions). And they don’t go super obscure. You can cover 100% of previous answers by getting about 20 current world leaders. That’s is a fantastic ratio.
There is also a game theory element of studying in areas other players are not. We may right off civil, revolutionary and Napoleon war battles as I expect a lot of kids go deep in those. Use our time to pick up points in art and literature, etc
one thing I will say going off of my experience playing in the high school national bee a few years ago and reading at euros last year, it gets less canonical in the IAC world as you go up in difficulty, the writers do love to add in geography/current events/art/literature and your occasional pop culture so being prepared for that, especially above competition who doesn’t study for that can make the difference in higher level matches
Thanks.
I figured as much as I read through and analyzed all the old national level questions that are publicly available.
I put the distributions into categories and looked at the “obscurity rate” of each category to get a rough idea of how many answers one would have to know to get close to 100% of what could be asked in that category. The result was a ratio of how many things to study to get a single correct answer (roughly)
One of the best ratios is “current world leaders” - it gets asked a LOT (almost once per 30 questions). And they don’t go super obscure. You can cover 100% of previous answers by getting about 20 current world leaders. That’s is a fantastic ratio.
There is also a game theory element of studying in areas other players are not. We may right off civil, revolutionary and Napoleon war battles as I expect a lot of kids go deep in those. Use our time to pick up points in art and literature, etc
>> "her only miss in finals was mixing up the youngest person who won a Nobel prize with the youngest person to be Time Magazine’s Person of the Year"
Holy crap — congratulations, Everest!