Some Challenging Times competitors take the competition very seriously indeed. In certain institutions, teams are carefully balanced according to their field of study to provide the maximum breadth of expertise.
Others spend hours practising on makeshift buzzers to improve their reaction times when it comes to the real thing.
A few teams have mentors who grill them on a wide range of subjects and prepare them psychologically to enter the battlefield. So what kind of gruelling preparation must the UCD team of Stephen Dodd, Seamus Sweeney and Dara Connolly have undergone to beat the combined colleges of the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) and emerge as champions in the Irish Times/ RTE third-level competition?
"To be honest, we didn't do much preparation at all," says team captain Stephen Dodd. "We were pretty lackadaisical. We went to a few pub quizzes, had a look at quizzes on the Internet and asked each other a few questions."
Did the team at least practise on buzzers beforehand, like most others? "We meant to, but we never got round to it."
This UCD team were newcomers to the competition, having qualified as the top three individual scorers in UCD's own run-off last year. Dodd says their inexperience let them down in the early rounds of the competition.
"We were a bit sloppy at the start. I tended to shoot my mouth off when I should have conferred with my team-mates. Eventually, we decided we would confer on team questions, no matter how simple they were."
UCD made a promising start to the televised portion of the competition, beating last year's finalists, University of Limerick 220 to 125. Victory in the quarter-finals also came easily, when they disposed of NUI Galway with 75 points to spare.
However, Dodd describes their semi-final encounter with capital arch-rivals Trinity College Dublin as "the real final for us". In an encounter that presenter Kevin Myers described as being like "a reenactment of the Vietnam War", UCD won the highest-scoring round of this year's competition with just 15 points to spare.
Meanwhile, after a tight squeeze against Sligo Institute of Technology in the first round, DIT began to shine, beating the Honourable Society of the King's Inns by 70 points in a high-scoring round. They beat Mary Immaculate College of Education in a hard-fought semi-final which they never really looked like losing. Still, UCD had reason to be confident going into the final. They had met DIT in run-offs before the televised rounds and beaten them comfortably. However, they were still wary of Ronan O'Keeffe's team because the DIT contingent had improved noticeably as the competition progressed. In the event, the final was closer than the Belfield trio might have expected, and they only pulled ahead in the last few minutes of the encounter.
From being five points down two-thirds way through the match, they emerged victors with 55 points to spare, earning UCD a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica and £2,000 to buy equipment for disabled students.
What next for this world-beating team? Stephen Dodd and Dara Connolly will shortly face the job market, armed only with their Challenging Times trophies and postgraduate qualifications in law and engineering respectively. Seamus Sweeney, having made the successful transition from Blackboard Jungle to Challenging Times, will return to his medical studies. DIT's Brendan Dunne, Bryan O'Connell and Ronan O'Keeffe live to fight another day, having returned their institute's best performance in the competition so far.
