ACF Fall is the premier easy tournament in college quizbowl. Designed as an introduction to college quizbowl for novices and players with limited high school quizbowl experience, over 200 teams compete on ACF Fall each year, making it the most widely-played set in the college calendar.

2024 ACF Fall

2024 ACF Fall

2024 ACF Fall will be held on October 19, 2024.

Editors

2024 ACF Fall is head-edited by Alexandra Hardwick. The subject breakdown by editor is:

Editor	Subjects
Eric Chang	Visual Fine Arts, World Literature
Benjamin Chapman	Chemistry, Other Science (excl. Math)
Ophelia Cherry-Pulay	American Literature, British Literature
Ganon Evans	Other History, Myth, Religion, Pop Culture
Sam Foo	European Literature, World History
Kevin Jiang	Social Science, Geography, Current Events
Aum Mundhe	Other Fine Arts, Philosophy
Andrew Rout	Other Science (Math), Physics
James Wang	Biology
Steven Yuan	Auditory Fine Arts

Rules

This tournament will follow ACF’s official gameplay rules. Rules specifically pertaining to online tournaments are in blue.

Registration

Once tournament hosts are chosen, teams will be able to register for the tournament by filling out the central 2024 ACF Fall registration form with all relevant information. This form will go live on August 28, 2024. Once tournament sites are confirmed, they will be listed below under Hosting.

If possible, teams should register for the site that is geographically closest to them and/or is in the region they would normally attend. After the field cap for their site is reached, teams will be placed on a waitlist or potentially assigned to another site. Please register by October 13, 2024.

Fees

Team entry fee or discount
Base fee per team	$120
New to quizbowl discount	−$80
Shorthanded discount (1–2 players)	−$60
Staffers	−$25 per staffer with functional laptop. Staffers must register with ACF in advance.

The minimum fee is $0 per team.

The “new to quizbowl” discount is for schools that did not send a team to any regular collegiate academic tournament (not counting exclusively novice tournaments) since September 2023, and which have no players who competed in non-novice collegiate tournaments during that same period.

Host sites will bill teams as soon as possible after the teams register. Teams should pay their host sites by whatever method is convenient for the hosts, who will in turn pay ACF by check or PayPal.

See below for packet submission discounts.

Eligibility

To make this tournament more accessible to new teams and players, ACF is enforcing eligibility guidelines for ACF Fall. Players are not eligible to compete at 2024 ACF Fall if, at any point, they:

Scored more than 60 PPG in the prelims of a college mirror of ACF Fall, OR
Were the top scorer (highest overall PPG) on a team that finished in the top 15% of the field, rounded up, at ACF Fall, OR
Scored more than 60 PP20TUH in the prelims of HSNCT or 60 PPG in the prelims of PACE NSC, OR
Were the top scorer (highest overall PPG) on a team that finished in the top 30 at HSNCT or top 10 at PACE NSC, OR
Finished in the top 12 in IPNCT
Scored more than 20 PPG in the prelims of ACF Nationals

The eligibility restrictions do not apply to high-school-only mirrors.

Players are responsible for determining their own eligibility; if you have questions, or believe a player should be eligible to play but is excluded by the current guidelines, please don’t hesitate to email eligibility@acf-quizbowl.com. Failure to abide by these eligibility guidelines may result in disqualification from ACF Fall and/or future ACF tournaments.

Packet submission

As for the past few editions of ACF Fall, no teams are required to submit questions in order to play the tournament. However, ACF still needs high-quality half-packet submissions from teams to complete the set. This year, for the first time, each team has the option to submit either a full half-packet (12/12 questions) or a quarter-packet of 7/7 questions, with adjusted discounts listed below.

If a team wishes to outsource part of its packet to a player not expected to play on that team (e.g., a student who has graduated), it must first receive approval from the head editor. Non-playing students are welcome and encouraged to help their newer club members write, especially for Fall, but it’s useful to know the contributors for both credit and logistical reasons.

Below is the submission schedule for ACF Fall. All deadlines are at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time. In addition to these, all submitting teams are eligible for an additional −$20 quality discount if their half-packet questions are particularly polished and usable (or −$10 for a quarter-packet), up to a maximum discount of −$80. Each team may submit a maximum of one half-packet.

Submission deadline	Packet discount
Sunday, July 7	−$50
Sunday, July 28	−$40
Sunday, August 4	−$30
Sunday, August 11	−$20
Sunday, August 18	−$10

If you would like to submit a half-packet or quarter-packet, fill out this form. ACF will respond with a half-packet or quarter-packet template specifying which categories you are assigned to write.

Before writing, please review ACF’s packet submission guidelines and stick to the format provided. Answers should generally emphasize playability over creativity: aim for creative and interesting clues with straightforward answer lines. These 5 model tossups from the 2023 edition of ACF Fall reflect the difficulty and style to aim for. Tossups should be 6-7 lines in point 10 Times New Roman, and each bonus part should be maximum 2 lines long. Teams may be asked to edit submissions, which may lead to them missing deadlines, if multiple questions are much too short or much too long. When finished, submit your half-packet or quarter-packet by emailing it to fall@acf-quizbowl.com.

Your assigned half-packet or quarter-packet may ask for questions from more specific categories within the distribution. For instance, instead of being assigned an “American Literature” tossup, you might be asked to write a question on a 20th-century American poem, or an Economics bonus instead of “Social Science/Philosophy.” This should reduce redundancy in submissions and maximize the number of submitted questions we can use, without being too constraining. The submission form offers space to indicate your writing interests in each category, which we will do our best to accommodate.

Distribution

ACF Fall uses the standard ACF distribution.

Hosting

Mirrors will by default be regional. ACF reserves the right to move teams and staffers between sites. ACF intends to mirror 2024 ACF Fall in the following regions:

Region	Site
Northeast	MIT
Upper Mid-Atlantic	Rutgers
Upstate NY	Cornell
Lower Mid-Atlantic	UNC Chapel Hill
Southeast	Georgia
Florida	University of Central Florida
Great Lakes	Ohio State
Midwest	UIUC
North	Minnesota
South Central	Murray State College
Pacific Northwest/Mountain West	Washington
Northern California	UC Berkeley
Southern California	Claremont Colleges
Eastern Canada	Ottawa
Northern United Kingdom	Durham
Southern United Kingdom	Southampton

High-school-only sites:

As in previous years, ACF is willing to provide the ACF Fall set for high-school-only tournaments. If you are interested in hosting a high-school-only mirror of 2024 ACF Fall, email hosting@acf-quizbowl.com and cc fall@acf-quizbowl.com. However, we do not plan to offer mixed mirrors that include high school and college teams.

If you have any other questions or concerns, please email fall@acf-quizbowl.com.

Past tournaments

Sample questions from previous iterations of ACF Fall are on the Collegiate Quizbowl Packet Archive.

Announcements and information about previous iterations of ACF Fall are archived below:

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