Thursday, November 11, 2004
Doping for nerds
Mark Kleiman reviews an article in the Wall Street Journal that looks at students taking stimulants to boost their test scores, particularly their SAT scores. Seems that stimulants also stimulate your mind [ed - you're on quite "stimulant" today], something anyone who was on the quizbowl team with me would know.
Typically, I'm all hyped up from sugar and caffeine for the first several hours of a tournament and do rather well. However, I crash towards the end of the day and my play takes a rather noticeable dive. I experience similar effects depending on how much sleep I get the night before the tourney (more sleep results in better play, less sleep results in worse play). My play is a direct function of my mental alertness. While I may be a more extreme case, I figure other quizbowlers experience similar effects.
My question is the following: how long before quizbowl tournaments begin screening for "performance enhancing substances?" If no screening occurs, how long will it be before truck driving schools realize they can dominate the quizbowl circuit?
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Typically, I'm all hyped up from sugar and caffeine for the first several hours of a tournament and do rather well. However, I crash towards the end of the day and my play takes a rather noticeable dive. I experience similar effects depending on how much sleep I get the night before the tourney (more sleep results in better play, less sleep results in worse play). My play is a direct function of my mental alertness. While I may be a more extreme case, I figure other quizbowlers experience similar effects.
My question is the following: how long before quizbowl tournaments begin screening for "performance enhancing substances?" If no screening occurs, how long will it be before truck driving schools realize they can dominate the quizbowl circuit?
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