Well, there were no themes or gimmicks in Thursday night’s quiz and we should at least be grateful for that. It was a perfectly decent, run of the mill general knowledge quiz and it was – and I know that I’m a heel for saying this – a bit of a bore.
You know, I couldn’t take a huge issue with any individual
question that was asked, which is something of a rarity for me, I know. But the
quiz as a whole somehow managed to be less than the sum of its parts. There was
no handout, for one thing. I’m ambivalent on handouts. I’m not a fan of ‘name
the vacuous celebrity’ type picture quiz handout but I do rather enjoy anything
more cryptic or anything that rewards a bit of knowledge.
Since I’m in full grumpy old sod more I’ll say that I think
that it works like this. You don’t have to be a great quizzer to make a great
quiz. However, it does help if you are at least good enough to know the
difference between a hard question, a ridiculously hard question and a
ridiculously easy one. Thursday night’s quiz lurched drunkenly from one extreme
to the other.
3 comments:
What is your opinion on handouts where if you take the first and last initial of each person in a large sequence of pictures, it spells out a trivia question that you then have to answer? Even if you don't recognize everybody, if you recognize enough of them, you can probably figure out what the question is going to be.
Hi there. Could you provide an example of this? It's an interesting idea but I'm having difficulty visualising it. It could be something to consider when setting future quizzes.
One of the questions at the quiz I was at that used this was something like, "Who was President of the United States during the moon landings?" where there were a few rows of pictures of people with the initials WH, OW, AS, etc, lined up so that you didn't have to recognize everyone if you could figure out what the question was going to be. At least at this quiz, we just had to answer Richard Nixon to get the full credit for that question, however there might be other quizzes that would use this kind of thing that would also score recognizing the full names of the people in the pictures.
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