World Scholar's Cup

Tournament Format

A team for the World Scholar's Cup is composed of three students. The teams are usually made up of students from the same school, but mixed teams are allowed. Students have the option of forming "independent" teams that may include students from other schools or even other countries. Each team participates in the four standard, round events.

Teams may participate in any regional round. If teams are unable to attend a regional round, but would still like to participate in the Global Round, they may qualify for a wildcard berth.

To qualify for the annual Global Round, teams must do one of the following:

To qualify to the Tournament of Champions at Yale University, teams must:

There are both senior and junior divisions in the competition. A student's age designates which division they may participate in. Students that are below age 14 participate in the junior division, while students 15 and older participate in the senior division. A junior can participate in the senior division if he/she wishes to. In Regional Rounds, both divisions participate simultaneously, though juniors only compete against juniors and seniors against seniors. At the Global Round, the divisions are staggered, with the junior division competing in each event one day ahead of the senior division.

Events

Each World Scholar's Cup Regional Round consists of four main events: the Scholar's Challenge, Collaborative Writing, The Team Debate, and the Scholar's Bowl. In addition to these four main events, at select tournaments additional activities take place. These activities are both social and academic, and strive to solidify the community aspect of the World Scholar's Cup.

At the end of June, top teams from around the world come together for the Global Round. At the global round, community events such as a scavenger hunt (Scholar's Scavenge), a cultural fair (Scholar's Fair) and a dance (Scholar's Ball) are added alongside the four main events, further cultivating the sense of global community of the program.

The Scholar's Challenge

The Scholar's Challenge is a multiple choice exam given to each individual competitor to complete within 60 minutes. For both the junior and the senior division there are 120 questions. The prizes are awarded for each subject as well as for the entire Challenge, for teams and for individuals.

In 2015, WSC introduced a new element to the Scholar's Challenge, the certainty factor. Whereas normal multiple choice quizzes let you pick one answer per question, the certainty factor allowed scholars to choose multiple answers for each question. The number of points scored is inversely proportional to the number of answers chosen. For example, if a scholar chose one choice and got it right, they would score a point. If they chose two answers and one was right, they would score 1/2 a point. If they chose three and one was right, they would score 1/3 of a point, and so forth.

Collaborative Writing

Collaborative Writing is based on an argumentative structure, with students picking one of six different prompts. Each scholar on a team must pick a different prompt. Scholars pick one side of a topic and write in favor of it or against it, with the goal to persuade readers to agree with their views. Students are expected to provide evidence to support their claims using any resources available to them (including the internet), with the exception of social networking sites and communicating with people other than their teammates during the exam.

At the beginning of the event, students have 30 minutes to work with their teammates to discuss and research their arguments. Following the collaboration period, students have 50 minutes to write their essay. There is no word minimum or maximum, and students are expected to cite sources. Following the writing period, students then have 20 minutes to collaborate again with their teammates to copy edit one another’s work, but they may not finish a teammate’s essay.

Team Debate

The Team Debate focuses on encouraging students to develop their speaking and logic skills, as well as teamwork, to argue orally for or against a topic pertaining to the curriculum. The Team Debate is a very important event in the World Scholar's Cup, because it focuses on coming together as a community to discuss intellectual topics. The format is a straightforward one, designed specifically to be accessible to all levels of debaters, as many students in the competition are experiencing debate for the first time (about two-thirds of the competitors at regional rounds are debating for the first time).

The event proceeds as follows: All teams are assigned a debate room for the first round of debates. Debate room assignments are distributed at a central gathering place just prior to the beginning of the debate event. Teams will debate three times. In the debate room, teams will meet their opponents and learn the motion. Teams are pre-assigned whether they are to support or oppose the motion. Teams will have 15 minutes to confer within the room before the debate begins. Teams may use World Scholar’s Cup materials or any outside resources to prepare, including computers and Internet access where available. It is up to the members of individual teams to assign themselves speaking orders. One student from each team will write the names of all team members on the judge’s scoring sheet.

Each student will stand in front of the room for the length of his or her speech. Teams may not make noise or interrupt while a student is speaking. Speakers may use notes. Students should not read their speeches in their entirety.

Students may speak for up to four minutes. There is no penalty for speaking up to four minutes. The judge will signal (usually with one knock), when the student has just one minute left to speak. At four minutes, the judge will signal (usually with two knocks) and the student may finish his or her sentence, but then must stop speaking and sit down. A two-member team may still debate, with one member speaking twice. A student who speaks twice will be scored only for his or her first speech.

Between speakers, teams will have 60 seconds to prepare before the next speaker is called. At the end of the debate, the judge (or panel of judges) will announce a winning team. The winning team will then proceed to a designated room and the non-winning team to a different designated room, where each will face another team with the same number of wins and non-wins.

One cultural aspect of WSC debate is the 'lollipop'. In order to promote positivity and self-improvement, the World Scholar's Cup in 2015 stopping using the word "losing" and instead now says "lollipopping". This change was also reflected in the debate schedules that each team receives, with the term "losing team" no longer used. As cheesy as it is, WSC participants call it "endearing" and a "comfort to their losses." One competitor from Hong Kong says "I love that I can leave WSC with bittersweet experiences."

The Scholar's Bowl

The Scholar's Bowl is a team event usually held in a theater. Team members work together to answer multiple choice questions that are displayed on a large screen.

In order to answer the questions, each team of students is given a "clicker" that connects to a scoring computer on stage. Students then choose their answer by pressing A, B, C, D, or E on their clicker. Once the question has been read aloud by the bowl master (usually Alpaca-In-Chief Daniel Berdichevsky), students are given 15–30 seconds, depending on the difficulty of the question, to submit their answer. The questions gets harder each time and worth more points than the last one. There are sometimes rapid fire questions which have to be answered in 3 seconds (5 such questions will be present and each question will usually carry 100 points).

The Scholar's Bowl implements many types of questions, many based on popular multimedia examples. The questions tend to include references to pop culture, and often include the names of WSC staff members. The tournament mascot, the alpaca, often also makes an appearance, however all questions related to alpacas do not carry points or they are used as practice questions.

Questions from each area of the curriculum are featured in the Scholar's Bowl. At the Global Round in 2010, a new scoring system for the Scholar's Bowl was introduced, making each question worth more points than the last as the questions get more difficult. After all bowl rounds have finished, there is a bonus round that includes question with points starting from 1000, all the way up to 2000 per question, as the difficulty level increases.

One of the main aims of the Scholar's Bowl is to allow the team of students to work together, using both logic skills and knowledge, to answer each question. Participants discuss the questions among their team, pulling together the different aspects of their knowledge in the pursuit of success. The Scholar's Bowl is often the last educational event of the competition before the awards ceremony.

The Scholar's Scavenge

The Scholar's Scavenge occurs each year at the Global Round and the Tournament of Champions, and first took place in 2009 in Singapore. Students are teamed up with those from other countries and given a list of tasks. At least one person in the team has a camera, and the tasks are completed by taking photos and videos. The tasks may relate to the curriculum (such as "create a city out of things you find in the park"), teamwork (such as "create a human pyramid"), organizers (such as "take a video of Daniel speaking Spanish"), or just silly (such as "take a video of your team singing an annoying song"). Each task is worth a certain number of points depending upon the difficulty. At the end of the scavenge, chaperons collect the memory cards of the student taking the pictures and score them. These scores do not count toward the scores in the competition as a whole, but are only used for this event.

The Debate Showcase

Another additional event is the Debate Showcase. The regional round's top 8 junior and senior debaters take part in this event. At Regional Rounds there is only one Debate Showcase with both juniors and seniors taking part. Regardless, 8 students debate in each Showcase.

The format mirrors the main event's format, but the students instead debate on stage in front of the rest of the participants. Each student speaks once for up to four minutes. When all six speakers have gone, the host of the Showcase invites volunteers from the audience and debaters from the showcase to step forward and share their general thoughts on the topic that was debated.

Additionally, top-scoring round debate participants (or runner-ups) are the judging panel for the Showcase. When the Debate Showcase ends, the panel announce the winners.

The Scholar's Ball

The Scholar's Ball was first added to the tournament in 2011 at the Global Round in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The idea spawned from a conversation about the competition where one party misheard "Scholar's Bowl" as "Scholar's Ball".

The Scholar's Ball encourages mingling, dancing, and the chance to "look sharp". Students are required to come in formal wear. Some scholars refer to it as a "pseudo-prom" or "nerd-prom".

The Scholar's Show

The first Scholar's Show occurred in 2010 at the regional round held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Its origins are spontaneous—it is the result of students' response to Queen's "We Will Rock You" playing during an intermission. Students began stomping their feet and clapping along, and one of the organizers encouraged them to sing along. When the song was over, Daniel Berdichevsky invited any student wanting to showcase their talent to come forward, and The Scholar's Show was born.

Since its inception, The Scholar's Show has grown from a spontaneous talent show to a showcase of students' ambition, skill, and bravery. Student performances range from vocal and instrumental performances to beat boxing, dancing, and magic tricks. The Scholar's Show is meant to bring students together by introducing them to mutual talents and interests. The Scholar's Show is held at all two-day rounds, and at each Global Round and the Tournament of Champions.

Notable performances include three girls singing a self-written song about Alpacas, to the melody of John Lennon's "Imagine" (2012 Beijing Round), and Berdichevsky himself doing a (bad) rap on Alpacas (2011 Global Round). A boy in Dubai also recited 100 digits of pi while a boy in Hong Kong performed another magnificent feat: correctly identifying all the capitals in the world to its correct countries.

Flag March

The Flag March happens at the end of every Global Round and Tournament of Champions before the Awards Ceremony. In the Flag March, there is one representative (flag bearer) from every country participating in the World Scholar’s Cup. The flag bearers carry the flag of their country and march to the stage.

The World Scholar's Camp

In 2012, the World Scholar's Camp was created, and took place in Singapore in December 2012. It included seminars and outings to various locations in Singapore.

Camps take place at various schools and cities through the year, while a Global Camp takes place at the Mini-Global Round every year.

Curriculum

The World Scholar's Cup curriculum has six subjects that relate to a larger theme. Each year the theme changes, and with it so does the Special Area. The curriculum is designed to help students understand the overarching themes of the subjects and how they relate to one another. Students are often given questions that require critical thinking skills as well as their basic knowledge to come to a conclusion rather than focusing on memorization. For instance, instead of asking on which date an experiment was performed, the question would ask, "Which artist would be most likely to oppose this experiment?"

The subjects of the curriculum are:

Until 2009, mathematics up to trigonometry was included in the curriculum. However, in 2010 it was eliminated in order to better address the goals of the competition. The tournament's decision to eliminate math stemmed from the subject's inflexibility and its difficulty to debate, though the World Scholar's Cup does not deny the importance of math in life and education. In 2008, the World Scholar's Cup added a "film" category to its visual arts section, and in 2010 added a "music" category to its art section.

Until 2013, the World Scholar's Cup released curriculum guides each year—one for each subject. The guides were available free-of-charge on its official website. Starting in 2013, topic outlines and theme-relevant material was made freely available to students through their website. The World Scholar's Cup recommends connecting each section of the outline to the given theme and how they connect or impact society.

Until 2014, there was a Current Affairs section, which was replaced by Social Studies. To address its absence, Current Affairs would from thereon out be integrated across all six subjects instead.

Theme Songs

In 2014, during the Global Round, Director of Social Stuff Burch Wang revealed that he felt that the competition needed a song to capture the never-ending feeling of the event. Just after the opening ceremony, he played his song, "Endless", for the first time. It was an instant hit with the scholars, as it was constantly asked to be sung by Burch during the course of the Global Round.

In 2015, Burch returned with another theme song, specifically written for WSC, called "Boundless". Its intention was to capture the idea of The World Unbound, which was the overarching WSC theme that year. This song was played several times during the 2016 World Scholars Global round, one specific rendition using piano and vocals causing Burch to cry in happiness. In addition, Chauncey Lo created a parody called "Burchless", and it was played in the Scholar's Bowl of 2016 Globals.

In 2016, fitting in with that year's time of "An Imperfect World," a theme even mentioned in the talent show acts, Burch wrote a song named "Flawless." Scholar's found themselves pulled in towards the lyric video as the words of Burch, from his heart and the art of the ink in water were stunningly beautiful, capturing the emotions that Burch had gone through to write this song. Before playing the song for the first time, Burch announced that this was one of the hardest songs to ever write, and that he rewrote it six times.

The Mascot

A ubiquitous symbol of the World Scholar's Cup is that of the alpaca. The alpaca appears on most, if not all literature released by the program, as well as in its official logo. At competitions, students receive their own alpacas from staff members. These alpacas may come in the form of finger puppets, stuffed toys, and sometimes dolls made with real alpaca fur. Different types of alpacas are showcased in the World Scholar's Cup. They range from the Japanese alpaca, Totoro, to several collector versions.

During the 2011 season in honor of biotechnology being the focus of the science subject, Daniel Berdichevsky introduced to the competition a new hybrid mascot known as the "Alpabear". These half-alpaca-half-bears "possess many of the same characteristics as normal alpacas." The founder also introduced the result of a science "fraught with peril"—a bright blue, giant alpabear known by the name "Blue Bear". In 2016, due to reactions from a Practice question, the WSC released a version of the mascot named "Trumpaca", alpacas with a funny face of Donald Trump.

"The Mascot Election"

The alpaca was elected the mascot of DemiDec and the World Scholar's Cup in 2006. Students nominated potential mascots online, and from that pool came the final three: The alpaca, the emu, and the penguin. At the end of the vote, the alpaca was victorious and the emu came in 2nd place. Theorists speculate that the reason the alpaca won is due to a split among bird-lovers.

However, in 2011, Berdichevsky hinted that the results of the election may be apocryphal. During the Scholar's Bowl, in lieu of a history section, the founder of World Scholar's Cup presented a historical analysis, he hinting that the election results may be mythical. Evidence of this has never been found, but Berdichevsky admits that he "may have had a pre-existing relationship with alpacas," and poses the question that perhaps he "was the one tallying the votes."

"Pwaa"

Another common occurrence during World Scholar's Cup tournaments is the echoing of the word "Pwaa". "Pwaa," explains Berdichevsky, "is the sound that a happy alpaca makes."

Often used as an interjection or a response to a statement, this onomatopoeia has become a sensation among World Scholar's Cup participants. It may also be used in a call-and-response format, as demonstrated by staff members at many competitions. Often, staff members will call out the word and find themselves echoed by hundreds of students. The word has also made appearances in Facebook statuses, and at the 2011 Global Round in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Deputy Prime Minister of Higher Education in Malaysia Dr. Hou Kok Chung Saifuddin Abdullah used it during his closing remarks. The word "Pwaa" is used as a pun in various places during the contest. Examples of usage: Pwaasome (Awesome), Pwaala Lumpur (Kuala Lumpur), Singapwaa (Singapore), Pwaalified (qualified), or just "Pwaa".

Scholars admit to using the word in an attempt to communicate with animals, and many claim positive responses.

Subjects Through the Years

Subjects in italics are subjects only for the Senior division.

The 2007 Global Round was the first world round for the World Scholar's Cup. Teams from Australia, Singapore, South Korea, and the United States participated.

Mathematics was removed from the curriculum starting from 2010.

The Music and History resources were not released.

The Science and Special Area resources were updated versions of their 2011 counterparts. Economics was replaced by Current Affairs in 2012 - for both divisions.

In 2013, emphasis was placed on topic outlines instead of the introductory guides.

In 2014, Current Affairs topics were integrated across all the above subjects.