The fifth edition of ConQuest, India’s premier national quiz on the Constitution, history, constitutional law and politics, is taking place online. The quiz is an initiative by the Centre for Law & Policy Research (CLPR).
The remaining two rounds of the total four knockout rounds were conducted on 17 and 18 October. Of the 16 participating teams, four teams — Delhi University’s Ramjas College, National Law School of India University Bangalore, Government Law College Mumbai and National Institute of Technology Jamshedpur — qualified for the grand finale to be held on 25 October.
More than 180 three-member teams from across disciplines had participated in the preliminary rounds held on 3-4 October.
A mixed bag of questions
The knockouts were structured into three rounds — ‘Potpourri’, ‘List It!’ and ‘Kahoot’, with the latter two focusing on multiple-choice questions.
In ‘Potpourri’, participants were asked questions from various topics using different formats. Teams were shown a picture of an institute and asked about its contribution to the making of India’s Constitution. It was a photograph of the Handmade Paper Institute Pune, which provided handmade paper for the original copy of the Indian Constitution. In another question, the logo of a theosophical society, a photograph of spiritual leader Jiddu Krishnamurti and a logo of the match girls’ strike — an industrial protest led by women and girls in London in 1888 — was displayed, and teams had to find the connection among them.
The connection was British socialist and activist Annie Besant, who was an active member of the theosophical society, had participated in the match girls’ strike, and had adopted Krishnamurti.
In ‘List It!’, teams were shown a grid of nine answers to a question, six of which were correct. They had to pick the right answers in under a minute — 500 points were given for every correct pick and zero points if even one was wrong.
One team was asked which countries allowed dual citizenship. School of Law Christ University Bengaluru chose Australia, Brazil and Japan. But Japan was an incorrect answer.
In the third round, all the teams stumbled when asked which nine-letter word was derived from the Latin word for white-robed — the answer to which was ‘candidate’. No one could answer the question.
Seven out of eight teams answered correctly when asked the title of a book on sedition that punned on an event from the 1930s. The answer was ‘The Great Repression’.
The winners
The 16 teams that participated in the third and fourth knockout rounds were National Law University, Odisha; Jogesh Chandra Chaudhuri Law College, Kolkata; Delhi School of Journalism; Delhi University’s Ramjas College and Sri Venkateswara College; Indian Law Society’s Law College, Pune; National Law Institute University, Bhopal; National Law School of India University, Bengaluru; School of Law Christ University, Bengaluru; Indian Institute of Technology, Madras; National Institute of Technology, Jamshedpur; Dr Ram Manohar Lohia National Law University, Lucknow; Government Law College, Mumbai and Kirit P. Mehta School of Law, Mumbai.
In the third knockout round, Ramjas College with 13,521 points and NLSIU Bengaluru with 12,794 points qualified for the finals.
In the fourth knockout round, Government Law College Mumbai with 14,758 and NIT Jamshedpur with 14,234 points claimed spots in the Grand Finale.
This article first appeared in ThePrint.
