Oxford University Quiz Society

Useful Links

Here is a list of some links that might interest anybody wishing to play quizbowl in the United Kingdom.

The central organisation in the United Kingdom is UK Quizbowl, made up of past and present student quizzers. Their website has information about upcoming tournaments, setting up societies and practices, reports of recent tournaments, and other useful information and discussions about student quizbowl in the UK. Members of UK Quizbowl also modify American tournaments for a British audience, referred to as "Briticised" packets. They can be found on Facebook and Twitter, and contacted by email.

Most British tournaments are also announced on the message board of the Quizbowl Resource Center, a site sponsored by the American Partnership for Academic Competition Excellence (PACE).

The questions from nearly every recent non-NAQT tournament held anywhere in the English-speaking world can be found at the online Packet Archive. Younger students reading this website should note that this site also has a well-maintained archive of high school tournament sets. Note that the "Briticised" versions of various tournaments are not posted on the packet archive; feel free to e-mail us directly if you are interested in looking at one of those sets, either of which would be suitable for new British teams to use in practice.

If you are writing questions or studying very specific topics, you might be interested in consulting a database of questions from recent tournaments. Among the best is Quiz DB, which is also sponsored by PACE.

Some of the questions that we use in tournaments at Oxford are written by National Academic Quiz Tournaments, an American company for which several OUQS current and former members are writers. OUQS has sent teams in the past to NAQT's Intercollegiate Championship Tournament, one of the two national championships for American universities.

The Academic Competition Federation, which the other American collegiate national championship tournament (to which Oxford has sent teams since 2015), contains many useful links, including information about packet submission and question writing. Be especially sure to check out Jerry Vinokurov’s informative guide to writing better quizbowl questions.

Useful resources for running tournaments can be found in many places. The NAQT website includes links to the full NAQT rules, a printable version of the official NAQT score sheet, and a sample score sheet so you can see how to fill it out properly. If you want to keep digital statistics at a tournament, we would recommend SQBS, a free programme written by Chris Sewell. Detailed results from past tournaments can be found on the Quizbowl Resource Centre Tournament Website.

Your source for information about many aspects of the quizbowl world, including a fairly detailed history of the British Student Quiz Championships, is the Quizbowl Wiki.

Of our friends and rivals on the British quizbowl circuit, the Cambridge University Quiz Society currently maintains an active webpage, as do Warwick, Southampton, Edinburgh, ICL. We hope that there will be additions to this list soon (and apologise for any omissions)!

If you're interested in quizzing in your local area, try visiting the website of the Association of British Quiz Leagues (ABQL), a recently formed contact network. The Quiz League of London website also contains information about quizzes in various formats, mainly in London.

If you're interested in "quizzing" of a different sort in the United Kingdom, you may be interested in websites for a variety of very popular groups. These include Quizzing.co.uk, which is Britain's largest quizzing organisation; QuizQuizQuiz, which hosts everything from pub quizzes to team-building quizzes throughout the country; and the Mind Sports Olympiad, which hosts an individual national quiz championship.

For more information on our society in particular, please don’t hesitate to get in contact with us!