Question Feedback

It was the May Day in Melin quiz last night which I mentioned last week. I think that it went off quite well. Mind you, it’s a little difficult to judge, and this is the main thrust, for want of a better word, of this post.

When I compile the quiz and act as question master for the rugby club, I also mark all of the answer sheets for each round. Its no chore really, and more than that, I find it gives me some valuable feedback about the questions. You soon get to see which questions are too hard, which questions are too easy, which questions that you think are sitters have been made too obscure by the way you’ve phrased them, and so on and so forth. If your questions aren’t written clearly enough you’ll soon see by the number of teams getting the wrong end of the stick. If you care about how much people enjoy your quiz, as I am sure that most of us do, then this is the kind of informal feedback that comes in handy.

Last night we opted for the ‘swap your answers with another team format’. Horses for courses. That’s the way its always been done in this quiz, and to be fair there are advantages in seeing what other teams have written, maybe having a bit of a laugh and a joke with them about it. But it did mean that all I had to go on were the scores that the teams achieved. Now, there was a sprinkling of quizzers from the old Neath league – sadly defunct since 2000 – but for the most part these were just innocent civilians, so scores for each round ranging between 6 – 9 out of 10 showed me that I had probably pitched the questions at just about the right level. But it would have been interesting to see which questions in particular caused the problems, for future reference. Never satisfied see, that’s my trouble.