WASHINGTON (AP) – The Scripps National Spelling Bee is undergoing a major overhaul to ensure it can identify a single champion, adding vocabulary questions and a lightning-round tiebreaker to this year’s pandemic-altered competition. The changes, announced this week, amount to a new direction for the bee under executive director J. Michael Durnil, who started in the job earlier this year. The 96-year-old bee has in the past included vocabulary on written tests but never in the high-stakes oral competition rounds, where one mistake eliminates a speller. The only previous tiebreaker to determine a single champion was a short-lived extra-written test that never turned out to be needed.
The 2020 bee was canceled because of the pandemic, the first time since World War II that the bee wasn’t on the calendar. This year’s event will be primarily virtual, and the in-person finals on July 8 have been moved from the bee’s longtime home in the Washington area to an ESPN campus in Florida. Both new elements, however, also signal a departure from what for many observers is the core appeal of the bee: watching schoolchildren who have such mastery of roots and language patterns that they can figure out how to spell the trickiest words in the dictionary, even if they’ve never heard them before. The bee had co-champions from 2014-16. The 2019 bee ended in an eight-way tie after organizers ran out of words difficult enough to challenge the top spellers, whose preparation with personal coaches and comprehensive study guides was no match for the vaunted Scripps word list.
Durnil did not directly criticize the previous bee but said ending with one winner was a priority.
“I think the spellers don’t enter into our competition thinking that they’re going to have to share the ultimate distinction of the spelling champion with anybody else,” Durnil told The Associated Press. “From a competitive standpoint, we owe it to the spellers to identify the champion of the spelling bee.”
In the lightning round, spellers would have 90 seconds to correctly spell as many words as they could. The rapid-fire tiebreaker would only be used if the bee reaches the end of its allotted time and can’t get to a single winner traditionally by eliminating spellers for getting a word wrong. The remaining spellers would get the exact words in the lightning round and be isolated from one another.younger spellers – kids can’t compete after eighth grade – said there was a contradiction in Scripps’ justification for the changes. “Simultaneously saying that vocab questions on (the) live stage are being added to encourage understanding of words doesn’t match up with their addition of a lightning round of spelling,” Mishra wrote in an email. “Adding a lightning round will only emphasize to spellers that memorizing and immediately recognizing a word is more important than really learning the words.”
