I was under the impression that you could only rate a quiz if you scored 2+ on a quiz, although I agree with the point you're trying to make.

Correct.

Yes indeed, you can only rate a quiz when you've answered at least two questions correctly. But the requirement of two correct answers is the same whatever the total number of questions in the quiz - even if it's a quiz consisting of 25 questions, you still only need two correct answers to rate the quiz.

I wonder if one can rate a quiz in a retake. For instance, if I score too low on an interesting quiz, could it help to retake the quiz and (hopefully) get the required two correct answers?

Jan,
I think that has happened to me before, I have been able to rate a quiz that I originally scored too low on for the rating to take. The difference is that when I rate a quiz that I have already rated or one for which I didn't get enough points, I am just rerouted without showing that I got 20 points for rating the quiz. I am almost positive that I have gotten that message after re-rating a quiz when scoring higher on it a few days later.

Even if you retake a quiz, the only score that is saved/counted is the original score.

Right, but we are talking about being able to rate quizzes. The only time I have retaken quizzes is for challenges where I need to get a better score to get the tick-mark on the list and have it count for a challenge. I know I don't get a better score again for that, but I am almost sure that where I was blocked from rating the quiz the first time for not even having gotten two right answers, the second time when I got five or more I was able to rate the quiz and have it go through.

Sue's right. I've noticed that too and I remember trying it out with one of Jazz's quizzes that I had scored too low on the first time.

Poor is probably the lowest I've ever given something. I've never (unless it was by accident) rated a quiz as very poor, not even the ones from more than a decade ago. If it was good enough to get online then, then that's not really fair. I'm a Libran (in real life too lol). Fair is what I'm all about. Even if I hated the SUBJECT of a quiz, I can appreciate either the work or the writing style that went into same. I've given excellent ratings to quizzes I knew absolutely nothing about (but which led me to mega-jump-googling for hours on related questions - sometimes it takes me more than an hour to complete a quiz - since I'm easily distracted LOL)

Ratings will always be subjective, of course. Nothing to be done about that. Some people rate all your quizzes as bad, simply because they don't like your online persona. Some people rate your quizzes excellent simply because you're on the same team.

But if I rate one Excellent and one Good, that's only because some are more "gooder" than others. They can't ALL be excellent lol. I try to/hope that I rate in comparison to all the ones I've played before.

As for editor's suggestions... yes I cringed when I got them (who wouldn't? lol), but in the end they always made for a better quiz. And now I have two favourite editors! - honestly folks, they have YOUR best interests in mind.

I agree with several posters above on many points.

All that being said, you probably shouldn't listen to me - because, of the quizzes I've written, my personal favourites don't have the highest ratings (giggles).

In my experience, ratings are often not based on how good the quiz is overall, but instead, the main factors seem to be:

-The difficulty (10 question quizzes with 7-9 average correct seem to do the best)
-Are the questions short and simple, while interesting? (not too nit-picky)
-Do you have a decently sized II? (It seems that the quality of the IIs don't matter as much as the size of them... I attribute this to people not really reading them.)

The other thing is that once you get a high rating, people will just ASSUME that the quiz is good and give it an Excellent even if that isn't their opinion. Unfortunately, the same applies for low-rated quizzes. This means that its hard for your quiz's rank to change direction! (If its going up, it'll keep going up, if its going down, it'll keep doing so.)

I really wouldn't care too much about the ratings. One of my best quizzes (in my opinion) is rated at 37,131 - the second lowest of all my quizzes. Its a Harry Potter roleplaying quiz which took me forever to write, and which I've gotten some nice notes about from editors. Because the questions are all long and multi-sentence, players have to spend longer on it, which I assume they don't like.

On the other hand, my second best rated quiz (2726) is honestly just an average, nothing-special, simple quiz. No idea why it got good rankings, if I was to rank it I would probably give it an average.

However, if you get a quiz within the first 500, it normally means that that quiz actually IS good. For instance, my highest quiz (rated 408 and climbing) is probably my favorite quiz of mine, and definitely teaches people the most.

While I agree with everything you've said, I think that is the main point. Don't get too upset about ratings - as long as you are happy with the quiz, nothing else matters.

My second favourite quiz is not just in the bottom half of quizzes, but in the 90,000s. The top rated quiz I have (10,655) is, in my opinion, boring. It must have taken an hour to write, where as the 90,000 one must have taken at least 5 times as long.

I'm not at all sure about that. I don't think that many people rate on that basis. Perhaps quizzes with high ratings generally get played more and/or get a wider cross-section of players.

However, some people seem to pay very little attention to the quiz when rating. Some time ago a player sent me a compliment, but added that as the quiz had so many 'numerical questions' she'd not felt able to rate it Excellent, only Good. I was puzzled, went to the quiz, and it didn't contain even one single 'numerical question'. Presumably, something bugged the player but it can't have been what she said it was.

There are many, many factors at work when people rate quizzes.


Editor, History and People

I think a fairly important factor that hasn't been mentioned is the mood of the player. If they're angry or upset at something, they might "take their anger out on the quiz" and rate it worse than they should. However, it does work both ways - a happy player might give you an excellent when they would give you a good or an average normally. Of course, you can't control the mood of the player, but it might still effect the rating.

I just played the quiz in question (although I guessed for all of them, because I haven't read the book in question) and I liked it! If I could rate it, I'd definitely give it an excellent.

However, I think that in this particular case the bad ratings may have come from people taking you too seriously - saying, "If you have ignored all my warnings to not play this excuse for a quiz, please rate it badly, so others will know not to play it. " is not very likely to help improve your ranks. :p

Additionally, non-10 question quizzes are generally not ranked as high.

I'm not sure anyone did take me too seriously, but I think the tone was what made it such a badly rated quiz. I got a couple of messages from people telling me to shut up - in retrospect some of the things I wrote might have been a little OTT (but they didn't have to be so rude).

If people are rude to you in quiz compliments then flag them to the editors or admins - there is no call for that kind of behaviour on FunTrivia and it is not tolerated.

I did report one of them, but I deleted the messages because I didn't think the admins would need it to be in my inbox and I didn't want it sat there if it didn't need to be. If I got another one I would report it and not delete the message until I was told I could.


Edit reason: First bit didn't really make sense

Bloomsby, I think the quiz ranking does have something to do with how others rate it. Playing a quiz rated under 10... It is difficult for me to rate those even good... I feel bad not giving it an excellent, thinking they must be better than I realize... So I so think the ranking has something to do with it, personally.

When I rate quizzes, I hardly ever rate them based on their ranking. The quizzes that I enjoy playing are the ones I give "Good" and "Excellent" ratings. It doesn't matter to me how many questions there were or what the ranking was or how difficult the quiz was (you know, Tough, Difficult, Easy, etc.). My personal quizzes are not rated any easier than "Tough" and it is the more difficult quizzes that I enjoy playing. If I can whip through it like a "Piece of Cake" game, then I tend not to rate them as high. Often times there are corrections, or points of contention that I have with an answer or "interesting information" on a quiz, but those don't necessarily affect my rating either. I have had issue with questions on quizzes, and have let the authors know, and have still rated the quizzes "Excellent". I like playing quizzes, and rate quizzes higher, that feel to me as if they took a lot of time and thought to create. My recent "The Lyrics of Les Miersables" quiz took me 8 hours of research and rewriting to complete. It has 25 questions and they are all fairly long. The additional information I included are not exactly short one-sentence facts. The quiz is "Difficult", but still of the 25 ratings it has gotten, 21 are "Good" and "Excellent". There are more "Good" and "Excellent" ratings than people who have scored over 20/25 so that leads me to believe that even not doing well on a quiz doesn't entirely affect the ratings.

Well said, kaddarsgirl.
How a quiz is ranked makes no difference to me. If it's easy, medium or difficult has no bearing on how I rate them either. I'll tell you a couple of things that would make me rate a quiz poorly:
(a) If it appears to me the quiz was slapped together haphazardly and the quizzer devoted very little time to it. How do I determine that? If the i/i is sparse or does not address the question at hand. I want i/i that is pertinent, not all over the place. I don't want it giving more information about the wrong alternate choices than the correct answer.
(b) Confusing language. I want to be able to know exactly what the quizzer wants, even if I don't know the answer. I'll give you an example: "Cleopatra gave Catherine, her daughter, an heirloom. How did she like that?" Now does the quizzer mean how did she (Cleopatra) like it or how did she (Catherine) like it?
(c) What I call "Gotcha! questions." If it appears to me the author WANTS me to get it wrong by offering a tricky question that has an alternate incorrect choice he knows I'll go for, that's a GOTCHA! Too many of them and the quizzer earns a less-than-stellar rating from me.
However, having said all that, most of the ratings I give out are on the positive side.
What distinguishes a "good quiz" from an "excellent quiz" to me? Good writing with some humor. Every now and then, use a silly alternative choice that has to be a joke (after all, you have three wrong answers to offer.) Also, tell me something I don't know. Make me go hmmm every now and then. Those things are the mark of an excellent quiz, not just a good one.

I can't remember ever noticing what the ranking of a quiz was before I took it, unless I was led to it by something like the Top 25 link. Almost all the quizzes I play are brand new ones that are not ranked yet, so can categorically state that this plays no role in my ratings.

Of my top 25 quizzes, ten have more than ten questions, so I don't think quiz length is a big factor, either.

My honest opinion? Quizzes that are enjoyable to play get high rankings. It really is as simple as that. Different people will have different ideas of what 'enjoyable' means, so you can't really play to that with any degree of accuracy. Best you can do is write quizzes that you find enjoyable, and hope that you're not the only person with your tastes.

I don't mind them - in fact, it often makes the quiz better (IMO). It might make the questions harder, but you have already said that the difficulty doesn't affect the rating.

As for obviously incorrect answer choices, I hate them. Just because there are 3 incorrect answers doesn't mean you have to make it easier for players - use a true/false if you want them to have a 50:50 chance of guessing it right, and if you make all 3 answer choices obviously wrong then you might as well be asking what 1+1 is. I have seen plenty of ridiculous answers, but not a single funny one. I can't see how giving Bob the Builder as an option for the person who founded Facebook or asking whether Abraham Lincoln was a ancient Egyptian god would make anyone laugh.

Oh, was Abe no Egyptian? Surely he did hunt vampires. Or didn't he?

Maybe the time taken to construct a quiz could be noted somewhere on the title page or in the rating section? Someone who takes several hours and puts together an enlightening or entertaining, or both, quiz should get higher kudos than someone who threw one together in an hour. Not to say a quality quiz cannot be constructed in a short period for some quiz types or subject matters but I'm thinking reviews before submittals take time and that might be a factor raters (and subsequently rankers) would want to consider.

Edit: I think this still stands the test of 'write it on a word processor first'. That method takes a lot of time to copy over to individual boxes and review that no copy errors have been made. Until FT allows the wholesale translation from a database that copies a template into a template, good quiz construction should take a couple of hours.

If that is created, that might affect the ratings people give. Then people will start to cheat and just leave the quiz writing page on for hours without actually writing anything or altering anything.

Editors can see this, and it's not a very good indication of anything.

Yes, a quiz by a first time author that has taken twelve minutes from creation to submission isn't very good, but players aren't going to see that quiz in its initial form anyway.

I agree. I do actually write my quizzes in the quiz form instead of in a word processor. I like to be able to look at the questions as I go as they would appear to someone taking the quiz. I use this feature (that appears as an option every time you save a quiz) a lot when doing my quizzes. I just can't get that same feel in a word processor. I don't consider this cheating the system as the system now stands because no one cares how long the quiz editor was open. I often change my mind mid-quiz about the number of questions I want to ask and it's nice to move them around in the actual form. I just feel better designing/writing this way. It wouldn't be fair to someone else who writes their quiz someplace else and translates it into the form, taking less time, to rated worse for it, just because it takes me a long time in the actual form, though we may take the actual same time writing the quiz. I hope that all made sense...

You can usually tell, without a time stamp, how long it took someone to make a quiz. I don't think it's necessary to include that time anywhere on the quiz itself.

Exactly.


Good ratings should be the reward for errorless effort presented and poor rankings should result for those who toss them together willy-nilly. Now we make the distinction based in the way all above have said: mood, errors, factual failings, Interesting Info quality or lack thereof, etc. I would like to have just that little more data to help me make my mind up. As Agony stated, the editors know if the figure is bunk or representative of the real value. Allow editors to set the figure as an approximation on their part. Leave the author out of it. Just as we rank in generalities, the editors at submission can estimate several levels: under an hour; 1-2 hours; 2-8 hours; days.

Then there's a chance that for those who copied in their quiz in say 10 minutes although they worked on it for many hours will get negative ratings because people think they didn't spend too much time on it? Also, you have to consider that some people naturally work faster than others - faster workers may manage to write a 10 question quiz on a subject they know well (thus no need for much research) in under an hour, and it may well be of a very high standard. I don't see why on Earth players would need to know the time it took to write the quiz - judge it for what it is.

Agreed! Moreover, there's no way of telling how much time an author actually spends working on a quiz. The time from creation of the template to submission is quite meaningless. For example, I tend to create my templates and submit then work on them off and on for months. Obviously, that doesn't mean that I've sweating over writing the quiz for months!


Editor, History and People

My 8 movie anagram quizzes are all rated in the top 10,000 and took me many, many, many hours of work. The first quiz was submitted very quickly after I loaded the quiz template but only because I wrote it all on a word document first. I find it easier to work that way. It also means I don't need the internet to work on my quiz if my laptop is somewhere with no internet access. The quizzes were fine tuned over weeks and once I was happy with it I submitted it. If the time to write a quiz was based on the time from starting a template to submission it would be totally inaccurate and give people the wrong impression about the effort that was put in. I would hate to be judged on that factor as I find it irrelevant. If a quiz is good, it's good. It doesn't matter if it took one hour or month. The same applies if it's not so good.