Honda Campus All-Star Challenge

Honda Campus All-Star Challenge is a quizbowl tournament administered by College Bowl for Historically Black colleges and universities. The sponsor of the program is American Honda Motor Company.

The program started in 1989 when Honda proposed a program to the College Bowl Company for Black colleges (HBCUs). To that end, College Bowl created a program in which all 4-year degree granting HBCUs are eligible to enroll teams, and all participating HBCUs receive grants. From 1990 to 1995, the competition format consisted of sectional matches that led up to televised National Championship games on BET (all of them hosted by Clint Holmes). The current basic format was adopted in 1996, which abandoned the sectional games and the televising of games in favor of an all-encompassing 64-team National Championship Tournament (NCT) held each year in March or April. Since the 2010 season, only 48 teams have qualified each year.

From 1989 to 2011, Honda Campus All Star Challenge used the same gameplay structure as two of its sister shows- College Bowl and University Challenge.

Gameplay takes place during two eight-minute halves. Questions are split into toss-ups and bonus questions. The toss-up questions are always 10 points in value, while bonuses have varying point values of 20, 25, or 30 possible points. The toss-up questions do not permit conferring with other team members, with buzzers (using a lockout system) being used to designate who rings in to answer a question. The signaling player must be designated by the announcer- if the player answers without being recognized, their answer is counted as wrong regardless of whether their response was correct or incorrect.. The players may interrupt the moderator, but if an incorrect answer is given, the team is given a five-point deduction, and the question is completed for the other team (who may chose to interrupt it without a penalty). If the moderator has finished the question and a team member incorrectly answers it, the team is not given a penalty. If the player is correct, then the team has an opportunity for a bonus question, on which players a team may confer.

...
Wikipedia