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Competition Information
Each school can bring up to two teams of three to four students each, but there is a hard cap of 48 teams
The first half of the day is split into a written test (completed individually by each team member) and quiz bowl rounds. Teams are seeded based on their performance, with the top 16 teams advancing.
The second half of the day consists of single-elimination quiz bowl rounds between the remaining 16 teams. This continues until one team emerges victorious.
Strategy
HPEC relies heavily on quiz bowls, so make sure to practice this event extensively.
Each round contains 15 questions worth 10 points each. There is no penalty for wrong answers except when a wrong answer is given before the question is finished. The penalty for this is 5 points.
If the buzzer is hit before the question is finished being read, the person who hit the buzzer has only five seconds to answer. Make sure to only hit the buzzer if you are sure of the answer. However, if your team is down, hitting the buzzer early may be the only way to win.
If the buzzer is hit after the question is read, the entire team has ten seconds to discuss the question. It is usually a good strategy to hit the buzzer after the question is read, even if your team doesn't have an answer yet. Ten seconds is a lot of time, and it's often enough to come up with good guess or the answer itself.