Thursday 4 August 2011

A couple more Telegraph UC features

I noticed a couple more UC articles in the Telegraph online which you might be interested in - this one gives you the opportunity to test yourself on a set of UC questions : -

University Challenge - How well would you do ?

and this second one delves into the so-called 'curse' of University Challenge.

The Curse of University Challenge

Worth a look.

2 comments:

rayofsunshine said...

Is there any way of telling if the how well would you do article was in the paper earlier in the week?

The reason I ask is the jackpot questions at the pub quiz I was at on Tuesday were all from the list there which is dated Wednesday.

Wouldn't have done me any good if I had seen it beforehand as it's decided who can answer by raffle and they kept picking the wrong tickets.

HughTube said...

That second article was just a summary of the BBC 'Wonderland' documentary which was criticised for its deliberate attempts to imply the people who won it were strange and unhappy, it also omitted many people who have gone on to be very successful.

There have been a few spiteful articles about the programme over the years, Peter Hitchens wrote one basically saying that because he didn't do very well on one of the Professionals' series it must be worthless (I believe his brother did rather better as a contestant when he was a student which might explain something).

Also there was this: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1264094/Why-University-Challenge-champions-fail-win-life.html
which cites the 1995 Trinity team as examples of failures. One of them is head of R&D at the biggest software firm in the UK, one a teacher, another a Harvard professor and the other is an MP who has three books coming out this month. If that's failure where do I sign up!

Although we didn't win so I don't have to worry about this "curse".

P.S. I don't actually read the Daiy Mail, I just came across those articles. No offence to anyone who does though.