Rating quizzes: what are people's criteria?

I always try and rate quizzes I have taken, and I am curious as to what criteria people use when assigning "excellent" as opposed to "good" or indeed "average" or below.

For me, an "excellent" quiz is one which combines the following qualities:

1. It teaches me something I didn't know before
2. It is in some way "entertaining" or "fun" and provides a level of intellectual engagement that surpasses merely the rightness or wrongness of the answer
3. The author has taken the trouble to write accompanying notes which explain the answers or give useful background or in some way add to the educational aspect of the quiz
4. The alternative answers given, while not being right, are at least plausible and offer additional insight on the subject of the quiz

Things which demote a quiz down the rating order for me are:

1. Questions which are impossible to answer without detailed or specialist knowledge which a generalist has no hope of knowing. This particularly applies to literature, and to quizzes with topics like "Authors A-D" which include questions relating to[b][/b] books written by authors which only a tiny percentage of Funtrivia members can reasonably be expected to have read.
2. "All of the above"
3. Alternative answers which are patently ridiculous and offer no additional insight
4. Scanty or non-existent explanatory notes
5. Spelling and grammar errors
6. Obvious errors of fact
5. "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "Catcher in the Rye." these two books seem to appear in almost every literary quiz going. Yes, I know that's an exaggeration but it certainly feels like it!

I'd be very interested to know how other people approach rating quizzes, what they think is a "good quiz" and indeed an "average" or a "bad quiz."

Adrian

To me, this is exactly what the word "trivia" means. If you can't write a quiz about specialist topics at a trivia website, then where can you?

If a player doesn't know anything about a particular topic, he doesn't have to take the quiz. Even if he must take the quiz to fulfill some requirement for a challenge or a game, really he is still choosing to take it. So I don't think it's fair to penalize the author for writing something the author enjoys and knows a great deal about.

I disagree with point 3, too. When I write a multiple-choice answer I like to throw in an obviously wrong choice and a very, very tempting choice. Sometimes I make it two obviously wrong. This can happen when there really aren't three plausible alternatives.

I agree with points 4-6, though. I don't mind quizzes that offer ridiculous answers, especially if I am unfamiliar with the topic.

For me to rate an excellent quiz, I would agree with 1, 2 and 3. As for 4, it depends on the exact options, but I don't mind if one or two of the options are less plausible as long as they aren't completely ridiculous. Other people might think differently, but that's my opinion.

As for things that make me rank a quiz down, I would agree with 2 to 6. Point 1 depends on the quiz - if they've made it interesting, even if I'm not an expert on the topic, it could get rated highly. On the other hand, some specialized quizzes seem to focus on the least important details - what colour someone was wearing in scene 2 of episode 4 of season 1 of some TV show that no-one's heard of to begin with, and those quizzes certainly don't get high ranks from me. Point 7 (the one you accidentally labelled #5) depends - if the question is interesting and the II is good, I don't care whether it's about something very popular or something more obscure.

If I have to send a correction note on a quiz - for spelling/grammar mistakes or for another reason, that generally drags the rating down. It depends on how major the correction is, though.

I don't have a grading system for rating quizzes. If I feel at the end "yeah, that was OK" then I rate it average. If I feel "pretty good!" I rate it good. If a quiz blows me away, for whatever reason, then I rate it excellent.

I don't think it's really possible to compare fairly each quiz on the site based on one set of criteria. The author of each quiz had a goal in mind while creating it, whether it's to inform, to entertain, to be a bit silly, or a mix of these qualities. Some quizzes fail to meet their goals and others surpass them, and I think the rating of the quiz should reflect that, not some set of arbitrarily-defined rules.

I wouldn't say that I have a set of "arbitrarily-defined rules", but that what I've said above are guidelines that I usually follow. Yes, everything I rate is on a "case-by-case basis", but there are patterns and things that (IMO) make a quiz better or worse.

That's how I do it too. I've played a quiz and scored 3/10 but rated it excellent (and sent a compliment) as it was so well written, took complex points of history and very articulately distilled them down to an essence, and didn't waste time on totally immaterial parts of the subject. I've also rated a very simple For Children quiz excellent because at the end of it I had a huge smile on my face. It reminded me of the Dr Seuss books of my childhood. I enjoyed it thoroughly even though it was very simple and quick to score 10/10 on. I don't care. It was well written, entertaining, and deserving of an excellent in the For Children category in my opinion... and that's all the ratings are, opinions. If you enjoy it, rate accordingly, and vice versa

I will admit to giving higher ratings to quizzes with well written Interesting Information. If the quiz has sparked a bit of interest in me, I'd like to read more. If all a quiz has for II is something as mundane as "Canberra is the capital of Australia and has 500,000 people living there." then the good rating a quiz might have received from me falls back down to an average.

I don't have a defined set of rules. To me, at the end of a quiz, I just "know". Sometimes, brain teasers without interesting information are rated excellent; they were wonderful to play.

So, using the "has good information that explains the answer" really doesn't help a brain teaser. Yet some brain teasers, I rate excellent.

And, of course, some II sections are over done, and I prefer not to rate them so much. It depends on what is said, too. Someone could write six paragraphs of why Justin Bieber's hair isn't green. Others could write two insightful, short sentences that really pique the interest and explain the question thoroughly.


I, too, am one who goes case-by-case. Each player is different; we like different aspects of a quiz, different topics, and rate differently based on such.

That's what makes this site fun. We're not all identical robots.

If we were, the competitive games on the site would be a lot less fun

What I dislike are questions requiring a numeric answer. 'How many times did Rachel and Ross kiss?' kind of thing, or worse, 'What was the license plate number of...?'.

Like Lady C, Tizzabelle and salami_swami, I don't have a fixed set of criteria and I try to take into account the purpose of the quiz. For example, I wouldn't expect a Quizmaker Tune-Up to be like a Science quiz or a Brainteaser. Some quizzes are intended to be mainly educational, others mainly entertaining, and so on.

As Lady C said:



Having said that, there some things that irritate me and lower a quiz in my estimation, regardless of the purpose of the quiz:

1. Factual inaccuracy.

2. Poorly expressed questions that are hard to understand.

2. Long, 'shaggy dog' questions, with inordinately long introductions to a very simple question, for example things like: Which city on the Seine, sometimes referred to as the 'City of Light', home to the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame Cathedral, the Sainte Chapelle and famous for its wide, grandiose boulevards, is the capital of France? Questions like that are massively overladen with hints and contain stuff in the question that belongs in the notes.

3. Two or three obviously absurd possible answers as options.

4. Multiple use of All of these except in quizzes designed to be educational.

I could extend the list.

Things that I value in quizzes include:

1. Good research.

2. A theme running through the quiz.

3. Relevant notes.

Like a number of others, I don't have any specific rules in my mind, I just know. This thread reminds me of a final exam in a university course I took many moons ago. We were given two of the questions in advance so we could prepare to write our answers in the available time: "Which play that we read this semester did you like most, and why? Which play that we read this semester did you like least, and why?" The exercise of defending the choices actually made me realise that there were general expectations I was bringing to the plays, even though I had not clearly articulated them to myself.

I play quizzes to learn something, or to engage my mind in problem-solving (as in a Brain Teaser, or in trying to work out the answer to a question based on applying other information at my disposal to the new question), and would like to do so in a context that is engaging.

What engages me is a quiz that
a) has questions that capture my attention, and ask about interesting points of information.
b) is clearly constructed as a quiz, not just as ten (or more!) random questions.
c) has extra information that helps me learn more about the subject of the question, or at least be able to answer the same question again in the future because I understand it.
d) is written in a pleasing style - whether it is casual and chatty, or formal and instructional, it holds its tone and uses well-constructed sentences.

What disengages me is
a) a sense that the author is trying to make my life as difficult as possible to prove they know more than me, such as in giving me four consecutive days form which to choose for someone's birthday, or the color of the shirt Rachel wore the second day Tag worked in her office. This is exacerbated by information that states that the question I just got wrong was an easy question, and doesn't bother to help me learn why.
b) an author who does not seem interested in constructing their quiz in a logical manner (book and movie quizzes that leap randomly around the book or movie as another question springs to the writer's mind, instead of being organised to take me through in a developing sequence of questions are a regular irritant to me).
c) a writer who doesn't know how to write clear English. Typos and minor spelling errors I usually overlook, unless there are lots of them, as I know from experience how easy it is to miss something even after a triple proofreading. But I would like to be able to understand the question on first reading.
d) minimal and/or irrelevant information, especially when a question leaves me wondering about the correct answer.
e) errors of fact (unless, of course, it is something that has unexpectedly changed since the quiz was written, such as happened when South Sudan was recognised).

Every player will use their own criteria, and it is useful to know what they are for yourself, but not so that you can apply someone else's criteria in order to 'get it right'. The most important thing is that your score on the quiz should not be relevant, unless the reason you scored poorly is that the quiz violated the criteria you hold as important in a quiz. I have played at least two excellent quizzes on which I did not get at least two correct, and so could not add a rating - all I could do was send a compliment on a well-written quiz.

If I go to New Questions or Quizzes and I'm presented with some text that does not have a question mark employed in its delivery (and I don't consider implied as conforming to that), I find myself being forced to dislike the work. Sorry.