• About NAQT
• Official Rules
• Current: Honor Code

Honor Code

NAQT works to ensure that quiz bowl is a safe, welcoming, fair, and respectful activity for everyone and expects all participants to do the same.

1. All tournament participants are bound by an honor code to behave responsibly and ethically. “Tournament participants” for this purpose includes players, coaches, chaperones, institutional representatives, other people associated with a team, spectators, and tournament staff. Responsible and ethical behavior means that all tournament participants will…
   1. Treat all people present with courtesy. Avoid behavior that is physically or verbally aggressive, intimidating, hostile, harassing, or disrespectful to others.
   2. Avoid action or speech that is hateful or discriminatory toward others, including but not limited to on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, or other personal characteristics.
   3. Avoid behavior that disrupts the competitive integrity of quiz bowl. Examples of such behavior include, but are not limited to, cheating, enabling others to cheat, creating the temptation for others to cheat, deliberately gaining or facilitating access to questions in inappropriate fashions, colluding with another person to “fix” a game result, or intentionally “throwing” a game.
   4. Abide by all decisions of the tournament staff, honestly report details of game situations to tournament staff, and promptly report violations of this honor code to a tournament staff member.
2. Misconduct consists of behavior that is disruptive, unethical, unsporting, or otherwise in violation of the honor code outlined in section A. These categories may be interpreted broadly.
3. Any participant who is aware of possible misconduct must report it to a tournament staff member as soon as practical. Tournament staff members must report such instances to the tournament director as soon as practical. If the tournament director determines that the situation is serious or worthy of further investigation, they must report it to NAQT as soon as practical.
4. NAQT encourages reporting possible misconduct that took place outside of NAQT tournaments.
5. Misconduct may result in sanctions to be determined by the tournament director and/or by NAQT.
   1. These sanctions include, but are not limited to, suspension of a participant from one or more games, loss of game(s) for a team, score or clock adjustment, expulsion of an entire team from the tournament, or prohibition of individuals or teams from attending future events.
   2. Sanctions may be applied to an entire team, even if only one or several people associated with the team were found to have committed misconduct.
   3. NAQT may contact school administrations about misconduct, whether or not the team used the school’s name, was on an official school trip, or was chaperoned by a school employee.
   4. NAQT reserves the right to impose sanctions for misconduct that takes place at quiz bowl tournaments (regardless of whether the tournaments used the NAQT Rules and/or NAQT questions) or outside of tournaments entirely.