Here’s a thing. We won at the club again last night. Well there’s no point me pretending any more that just winning the quiz is enough to keep my curmudgeonly tendencies in check. But there are just some nights when I find the post mortem of the quiz on the way home in the car to be more enjoyable than the quiz itself. And yes, last night was such a night.
I find myself becoming something of a scratched record whenever
I write about the quiz at the club at the moment. But I keep coming back to one
thing. I honestly believe that your job as a question master is to give people
the most enjoyable evening that you can. And for the second time in three weeks
I found myself asking – did the question setter really think that people would
enjoy the quiz they asked?
Last night’s QM was one of our semi regulars. She’s lovely and to be fair the last quiz she did was enjoyable. To be fair, four of last night’s rounds were enjoyable again. Unfortunately four of them weren’t. I don’t know what your opinion is about True or False rounds. Personally I don’t like them at all. I don’t like guessing games. Actually let me rephrase that. I like educated guessing games, but I really don’t like the kind that asks you something that you are not going to know and so you have to mentally flip a coin. You know the sort of thing I'm talking about -
The second largest crater in the Solar System is about 2500 km in diameter. True or False?
There is no reason why you could expect people to know that it's true. Unless you were the geezer who set the quiz a couple of weeks ago you'd never ask -
What is the diameter of the second largest crater in the solar system?
Even when the true or false questions are fair I don’t really like the
way that they rob you of the satisfaction of knowledge. What I mean by that is that
instead of being asked, for the sake of argument,
Virginia Woolf actually wrote ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia
Woolf?’ True or False?
I would far rather be asked
Who wrote ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’.
The majority of the True or False questions were of this easy variety. Of the forty true or false questions last night we had only 2 wrong, I
think and the lowest scoring team didn’t have more than four or five wrong.
Now, I don’t know, maybe the setter really likes this kind of question. Maybe
she thought it would be a great leveller between the teams. But judging by the
groans she got from teams when she announced – the next round is another true
or false round – she can’t now think that it’s something people like.
Personally, I wouldn’t even include one whole true or false round in a quiz, but four is definitely too much. In my opinion.
There was one question last night that set alarm bells
ringing.
Usain Bolt holds 9 Olympic Gold medals – true or false? –
I’m
sure you know why the alarm bells were ringing. Usain Bolt now holds 8 Olympic gold medals, but he
won 9 – being stripped of one of his 3 relay golds when his relay teammate Nesta Carter was later found
guilty of doping. This is going to sound horrible, but the fact is that I know
some question masters who are knowledgeable enough, and precise enough in their
use of language in the question whom I would not have had a quiet word with. But I didn't think that last night's QM would appreciate the problems with the question last night. As soon as she finished reading out the questions in that round I went and had a quiet chat with her about the question. It’s well that I did, for the QM had it from an old quiz
book and had the answer as true. When she realised what had happened it's to her credit that she didn't stick with the tried and trusted - well, that's my answer and the question maser is always right (and to be fair she would have been perfectly within her rights to do so) she had the common sense to tell people that either answer - true or false - would be acceptable.
I’m finally off to Copenhagen on Monday so there will be no
UC review until I get back at the weekend. See you then.
1 comment:
It really depends who your audience is. My partner runs a club for adults with learning difficulties, and sometimes I'm roped in to do a quiz. For that demographic, I find true/false rounds really helpful and they're extremely popular... a quiz needs to be accessible, and with a group of people with varying different needs there might be quite a lot of people who struggle to get a very high score with more conventional questions, especially if they're difficult. But still, there are some people in the club who are quite knowledgable and academic, and the staff take part as well and it needs to be fun for them, so I still try to make the true/false questions fairly difficult and fairly interesting.
I think when writing true/false questions you have to think carefully about what suits your format. I agree with you about the size of the second largest crater in the Solar System, I would never write a question like that. The types I come up with are normally variants of the following types:
1) Just basic general knowledge - e.g. Rachel Parris is married to Marcus Brigstocke.
This question is true - they are married to each other, and some people know that, but if you don't know it it's basically 50/50 as to whether you get it right
2) Questions with a fun little trick - e.g. In Abigail's Party, Alison Steadman plays Abigail.
It's false - she plays Beverly, as Abigail is an unseen character. However, Beverly is the main character and the one who hosts the party we actually see, so a lot of people would get that wrong. And anyone who actually knows it will feel satisfied to have avoided my trap.
3) Questions that are a bit random, but have some strange logic - e.g. The tennis player Billie Jean King was once romantically linked to Michael Jackson.
This one is false, there's no connection between them at all - but Michael Jackson did have a song called Billie Jean, even though it isn't about her. A rational person could work that out quite easily.
4) Questions that are just plain strange - e.g. Venus Williams' middle name is Flytrap, or Ian Rankin is Sandi Toksvig's cousin
The Venus Williams one is obviously untrue, but the Ian Rankin one actually is true. Occasionally something that sounds highly unlikely will just turn out to be true, and someone might have heard that... or take a clever guess at it.
I think it's good to have quizzes that are accessible to people who may not be that good at quizzing - it's meant to be fun at the end of the day. Four rounds of it is definitely too much though!
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