At the beginning of the show, there is a coin toss, and the winning team gets to make the first selection of a category and point value from the game board.
There are six categories, Arts & Entertainment, Literature, Math & Science, General Knowledge, Social Studies, and World Events.
The current method means that a team could win their match, yet still fail to make the playoffs if their score was not one of the highest.
This was especially true from the late 1990s until 2002, when the show would sometimes air on Sunday mornings because NBC's NBA basketball telecasts preempted its traditional timeslot.
Phil Shepardson, an English professor at Westfield State College, hosted the show from its start in October 1961 until June 1991.
John Baran (WWLP's station manager) took over that autumn when the show returned from its annual summer hiatus.
For many years, the show's theme music was Leroy Anderson's "Bugler's Holiday", performed by the Boston Pops under Arthur Fiedler's direction.
At least two different Boston Pops recordings were used on the air over the years: one dating from 1967, and another from 1969 that featured a guest performance by legendary trumpeter Al Hirt.
In September 2000, "Bugler's Holiday" was replaced in favor of a generic-sounding, far less distinctive piece because of escalating music licensing fees.
"Bugler's Holiday" returned as the show's theme in 2007, played against photos of random historical content and past episode clips.
Through most of the 1970s and 1980s, a localized version of this series also aired in Dayton, Ohio on WKEF, which was owned at the time by WWLP's original owner, William Putnam.
When the new season of As Schools Match Wits premiered, the show welcomed radio personality and writer Chris Rohmann as its new host.
In 2010, As Schools Match Wits partnered with the new Boston WGBH-TV production, High School Quiz Show hosted by 1996 MIT graduate Dhaya Lakshminarayanan, to send their own qualifying teams from Western Massachusetts to also compete in WGBH-TV Boston's matches.