in thinking University Challenge should be for UNDER graduates?

[NotnOtter]

more and more I am noticing older students on the teams
Seems a little unfair......

• I read that as dead clever people. People who are clever and dead. Zombie University Challenge teams!

AIBU to think that only alive people should be able to participate in University Challenge?

yes, YABU. They have had episodes where it's previous contestants who are now middle aged. They need a new gimmick and previous contestants who are now dead would do admirably. It would capitalise on the fact that zombies are fashionable and bring in a new audience.
Plus, I think a lot of people would tune in to see the zombies turn on Paxo and rip out his still beating heart for mispronouncing 'Don Quixote'.

To the post grad supporters on here - I just think its unfair - my general knowledge is infinitely better at forty than when I was a student - the bearded bofifins have an unfair advantage

Well said more beta

Foglike Manchester reading the daily mail and the Beano.

I like quiz shows but this one doesn't float my boat.

They don't even win a car FGS :)

When I was at uni there were mature students in their 30's and 40's doing first degrees.
Should they be barred?

Zombie UC : Player 2 has joined the game.

I do think it is pretty impressive how well some of the Oxbridge colleges do though - I remember some college team getting a to something like the quarter-finals and losing, and Paxman pointed out there were only about 400 students at that college in total, to several thousand at the university that beat them!

It's been shown over and over that older teams don't do as well, they're just too slow. But then lots of postgrads aren't much older than the undergrads so I doubt they actually have so very much more general knowledge - I think they will only have more knowlede about their own narrow area of interest.

It's just a guess, but I would expect that allowing postgrads and mature students leads to a more socially mixed team. IME the private school educated tended to be more confident as undergraduates and would thus be more likely to put themselves forward for things like this. I and a lot of other people I knew only really hit their stride in terms of taking part in things rather than just hiding in the library, once we became postgrads, and mature students are often people who have had crap educational opportunities the first time round but have done something about it as adults.

Well when I was at Oxford the oldest undergraduate at my college was in his 50's, he would have been an asset to the team. Of course when you allow Post-grads that does mean you get more American's etc., now that can't be an advantage can it?

Oxbridge "normally win" as they've got more teams entered in my view too. There are 28 Cambridge Colleges and 33 Oxford Colleges so that's quite a lot of potential additional goes compared to the rest of the roughly 100-150 Universities that only get to send one team each.

EG 2012 which I know isn't finished yet but of 28 Unis starting, 12 Oxf/ Cam colleges... So, not far off a 50% mathematical chance of one or other of them winning, just on basic pairing maths and a bit of luck... In 2011 28 Unis started with 12 being Oxbridge- Magdalen won.

Not to take credit away from the players and the skill to do it but I certainly don't take it as a sign of Oxbridge utter brilliance. Size of Uni= irrelevant- unless you're coming at it from the POV that it's OK if Leeds can divide themselves their 30,000 students into "teams" of 400 students and have up to 75 teams?

Oh and the US normally hammer the UC best-of teams according to the listing I found online of special UC matches...

I don't think size of college is irrelevant at all. I think if Leeds got teams per 400 students they'd still win or lose just as often, because surely they choose the best 4 out of their 30,000 students, not just 4 people at random?

To be fair I've no idea how they choose the contestants but I doubt it is just random.

I am always impressed how well overseas postgrads do at what are often fairly British-biased questions.

I think being education in the American system would be better for general knowledge. Plus people who've chosen to move countries are often the types of people who like finding out about the new country's quirks - my best mate is an American studying over here and before she came she assumed we'd all know the kings of England off by heart nd so on. We didn't.

Regarding how people get on UC interesting detail here

I was at Uni with a few massive triv-heads and when we were taking it seriously for a year we had a circuit of pub quizzes round London to keep ourselves in beer-vouchers. In my 3 years snapshot there, I saw no process to find entrants at my Uni for a team. One of the guys in my beer-team who was UG at my Uni, went to PG at Homerton, then PG at Open when he did UC; they were runners up that year and he was in the special invitation team that went against the US team. He did (may still, out of touch now) end up writing questions for UC for a bit.

I tried out for UC pretty much every year I was an undergraduate and a postgraduate. I got to the final round of my university's tryouts almost every time, got on the team once (we didn't get through to the TV round) and then a second time and was finally on the show towards the end of my postgrad degree.

So my own personal point of view is that if it was undergrads only I couldn't have fulfilled my longstanding ambition (because every time I watched university challenge people would say to me 'You should go on this', even before I was at uni). Needless to say however, I didn't trouble the scorers excessively when I was actually on.

Also, from my personal experience, older people often pick up more knowledge, but young people are much faster and have better recall. So I wouldn't consider it unfair. If you got points for saying 'I know this, it's on the tip of my tongue', the oldies would definitely beat the youngsters every time. All the 'geniuses' who singlehandedly took their teams to victory by knowing everything in recent years have been young undergraduates.

Gail Trimble wasn't an undergrad! She's a grown-up academic now and it was only a couple of years back.

Sorry, as you can see my command of facts is far from impressive.

Guttenplan was though.

I had to look up and check as my first reaction was 'shit, if she was an undergrad back then I really have done very little with the last few years while she got a PhD and a job!'.

Some Cambridge colleges are wincy though - peterhouse for example had a fabulous team and that picked from only a couple of hundred students - now that IS clever

I do think the nature of a US degree helps with UC. Its a much broader education. (However we used to assume all American's could list all the presidents, but there are some the average American has barely heard of, much the same really, and as for the citizenship test....)