At Duke, the Best Seats Go to the Smartest Fans
Feb. 8, 2017
Hundreds of Duke students here spent hours this semester compiling study guides and cramming for the most stressful test on campus. It was graded on such a vicious curve that only about half of them passed. And there were so many people taking this midterm that Cameron Indoor Stadium was the only room on campus that could fit them.
But that was oddly appropriate: The exam was about Duke basketball.
The students with the highest scores didn’t get any sort of letter grade. They got to sleep outside for three weeks for the right to be inside Cameron again for Duke’s game against North Carolina on Thursday.
For more than 30 years, waiting has been the only way for the fans known as the Cameron Crazies to guarantee themselves a spot at college basketball’s premier rivalry game, which is why students have camped outside the arena for months to make sure they’re standing courtside.
But this year brought a wrinkle to Duke’s deeply peculiar tradition. For the first time ever, sleeping in a tent wasn’t enough of a sacrifice. A small group of powerful students had to devise a new way to supply the unprecedented demand. They decided on the most Duke thing imaginable: a trivia exam.
The fans with the best seats on Thursday will only be there because they aced a test first. They were the students who knew the most about Duke basketball.
“I studied more for that test than I do for tests in general,” said Sam Klein, a sophomore political-science major. “I just dropped everything and studied Duke basketball.”
This was necessary to begin with because of the byzantine system that decides which students get into the annual Duke vs. UNC rivalry game. Admission is determined on a first-come, first-serve basis. And the first come absurdly early.
It has been that way since rabid basketball fans in 1986 pitched tents outside Cameron and named their colony after Duke’s young coach. They called it Krzyzewskiville.
As the tent village has expanded—its population is now in the thousands—it has become more bureaucratic. It’s governed by students known as “line monitors” who oversee a K-ville constitution that is subject to amendments every year. This year, the official tenting period began on Jan. 11, at which point K-ville’s laws required two people be present at all times and 10 members to sleep in the tent during the night hours of 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. during the week and 2:30 a.m. to 7 a.m. on the weekend. The weekend is Wednesday through Saturday.
The early timing for the UNC game this season meant a short tenting season: only 21 days in the cold. And hours after K-ville registration opened, about 160 groups with as many as 12 students in each group entered for the first 70 tenting spots. That amounted to roughly 30% of Duke’s undergraduate population.
This was too many people. The line monitors needed some kind of solution. They had to figure out the fairest way to measure fandom.
“We knew we couldn’t do a lottery, because UNC does a lottery,” said Delaney King, a Duke senior and head line monitor. “K-ville is a meritocracy.”
They settled on a trivia contest. One student spent his winter break writing the exam, a fill-in-the-blank test with 37 questions and sub-questions, and the line monitors were careful about security. Only five people saw the test before it was administered out of fears it would leak.
On the night students packed into Cameron to take the test, there were no phones or laptops allowed, and notes of any kind were strictly forbidden. To avoid discriminating against freshman, most of the questions focused on this year’s team: the roster, players’ hometowns and vital minutiae like which team member successfully completed an on-court bottle flip this year. But there were also questions about Cameron Crazie traditions, like “when do we hex?” and “list the four cheers we do on offense” and, of course, “how do you spell Coach K’s last name?”
There was a lot at stake. Which is why students were extremely serious about their studying.
“We did the classic Duke student thing and put together a 10-page study guide in Google Docs,” said David Gay, a member of Tent 34.
In the days before trivia night, students crammed as they would for any other exam. It was common to see kids walking through campus re-reading their Duke basketball dossiers and furiously highlighting their notes. Some tents even tested themselves using a flashcards app on their phones.
Once they were inside, the line monitors circled the room like proctors, searching for any signs of cheating. After exactly one hour, the students put their pencils down and began refreshing their emails, waiting for the results. They soon found out there was no grade inflation. The cutoff was 77%, King said, and the highest score was 93%.
Duke Blue Devils forward Amile Jefferson said he ‘did amazing’ on the Duke basketball test administered to students.
Students who took the quiz but were below the cutoff were placed on a waitlist, and many of them registered for the shorter tenting session that started about two weeks later. It was still likely that they get into the Duke vs. UNC game. But some of the dejected said they considered transferring when they found out they had failed. It was unclear if they were kidding.
The exam caused enough of a ruckus on campus that it even reached the basketball players. Duke forward Amile Jefferson decided to take it himself. “I did amazing,” he said.
But the testing wasn’t over for the 70 tents that passed. That first quiz was merely an entrance exam. Then came the placement test: a second trivia night determining the order that students would be allowed into Cameron. It turned out to be a lot harder than the first one.
Klein was pleased with his group’s score on the second test: 57%. With his tent’s attendance at other Duke sporting events, that was good enough for Tent 31. “I didn’t think we’d do any better,” he said.
One of the tents that did better had a simple plan. “All of us studied as much as we could possibly study,” said Duke sophomore Rachel Sereix. When the exam began, her tent ripped apart pages to pass around and check each other’s work, and they turned in their answers at the last possible second.
Their strategy worked. They scored 86%—and Tent 5. They knew enough about Duke basketball to know in advance where they’ll be standing for the biggest game of the season: in the front row.
Feb. 8, 2017
Hundreds of Duke students here spent hours this semester compiling study guides and cramming for the most stressful test on campus. It was graded on such a vicious curve that only about half of them passed. And there were so many people taking this midterm that Cameron Indoor Stadium was the only room on campus that could fit them.
But that was oddly appropriate: The exam was about Duke basketball.
The students with the highest scores didn’t get any sort of letter grade. They got to sleep outside for three weeks for the right to be inside Cameron again for Duke’s game against North Carolina on Thursday.
For more than 30 years, waiting has been the only way for the fans known as the Cameron Crazies to guarantee themselves a spot at college basketball’s premier rivalry game, which is why students have camped outside the arena for months to make sure they’re standing courtside.
But this year brought a wrinkle to Duke’s deeply peculiar tradition. For the first time ever, sleeping in a tent wasn’t enough of a sacrifice. A small group of powerful students had to devise a new way to supply the unprecedented demand. They decided on the most Duke thing imaginable: a trivia exam.
The fans with the best seats on Thursday will only be there because they aced a test first. They were the students who knew the most about Duke basketball.
“I studied more for that test than I do for tests in general,” said Sam Klein, a sophomore political-science major. “I just dropped everything and studied Duke basketball.”
This was necessary to begin with because of the byzantine system that decides which students get into the annual Duke vs. UNC rivalry game. Admission is determined on a first-come, first-serve basis. And the first come absurdly early.
It has been that way since rabid basketball fans in 1986 pitched tents outside Cameron and named their colony after Duke’s young coach. They called it Krzyzewskiville.
As the tent village has expanded—its population is now in the thousands—it has become more bureaucratic. It’s governed by students known as “line monitors” who oversee a K-ville constitution that is subject to amendments every year. This year, the official tenting period began on Jan. 11, at which point K-ville’s laws required two people be present at all times and 10 members to sleep in the tent during the night hours of 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. during the week and 2:30 a.m. to 7 a.m. on the weekend. The weekend is Wednesday through Saturday.
The early timing for the UNC game this season meant a short tenting season: only 21 days in the cold. And hours after K-ville registration opened, about 160 groups with as many as 12 students in each group entered for the first 70 tenting spots. That amounted to roughly 30% of Duke’s undergraduate population.
This was too many people. The line monitors needed some kind of solution. They had to figure out the fairest way to measure fandom.
“We knew we couldn’t do a lottery, because UNC does a lottery,” said Delaney King, a Duke senior and head line monitor. “K-ville is a meritocracy.”
They settled on a trivia contest. One student spent his winter break writing the exam, a fill-in-the-blank test with 37 questions and sub-questions, and the line monitors were careful about security. Only five people saw the test before it was administered out of fears it would leak.
On the night students packed into Cameron to take the test, there were no phones or laptops allowed, and notes of any kind were strictly forbidden. To avoid discriminating against freshman, most of the questions focused on this year’s team: the roster, players’ hometowns and vital minutiae like which team member successfully completed an on-court bottle flip this year. But there were also questions about Cameron Crazie traditions, like “when do we hex?” and “list the four cheers we do on offense” and, of course, “how do you spell Coach K’s last name?”
There was a lot at stake. Which is why students were extremely serious about their studying.
“We did the classic Duke student thing and put together a 10-page study guide in Google Docs,” said David Gay, a member of Tent 34.
In the days before trivia night, students crammed as they would for any other exam. It was common to see kids walking through campus re-reading their Duke basketball dossiers and furiously highlighting their notes. Some tents even tested themselves using a flashcards app on their phones.
Once they were inside, the line monitors circled the room like proctors, searching for any signs of cheating. After exactly one hour, the students put their pencils down and began refreshing their emails, waiting for the results. They soon found out there was no grade inflation. The cutoff was 77%, King said, and the highest score was 93%.
Duke Blue Devils forward Amile Jefferson said he ‘did amazing’ on the Duke basketball test administered to students.
Students who took the quiz but were below the cutoff were placed on a waitlist, and many of them registered for the shorter tenting session that started about two weeks later. It was still likely that they get into the Duke vs. UNC game. But some of the dejected said they considered transferring when they found out they had failed. It was unclear if they were kidding.
The exam caused enough of a ruckus on campus that it even reached the basketball players. Duke forward Amile Jefferson decided to take it himself. “I did amazing,” he said.
But the testing wasn’t over for the 70 tents that passed. That first quiz was merely an entrance exam. Then came the placement test: a second trivia night determining the order that students would be allowed into Cameron. It turned out to be a lot harder than the first one.
Klein was pleased with his group’s score on the second test: 57%. With his tent’s attendance at other Duke sporting events, that was good enough for Tent 31. “I didn’t think we’d do any better,” he said.
One of the tents that did better had a simple plan. “All of us studied as much as we could possibly study,” said Duke sophomore Rachel Sereix. When the exam began, her tent ripped apart pages to pass around and check each other’s work, and they turned in their answers at the last possible second.
Their strategy worked. They scored 86%—and Tent 5. They knew enough about Duke basketball to know in advance where they’ll be standing for the biggest game of the season: in the front row.
