Hi!

I was wondering what the qualifications are to get 'sunglasses' on rated quizzes?

I have one quiz with an 87% rating but it lost its 'shades',
even though I have other quizzes with a lower percentage which still have their glasses on.

Could you let me know?

Thanks,
nyirene330

Sunnies are awarded for a quiz that is in the top 20 percent of all quizzes on FT. So you can get them, lose them, and get them back again. The popularity rating gives you an idea of how well the quiz was liked but it's not an exact indicator of where the quiz will be ranked.

It is purely the overall site ranking, which assigns each quiz a number calculated from ALL the ratings, including the Average, Poor and Very Poor which are not displayed to authors. Those "hidden" ratings can make a substantial difference, especially if your overall number of ratings is still relatively low. One Very Poor (I have distinct shuddering memories of accidentally submitting a couple of those in my early days, when I used Page Down to try and get the Rate and move on button into view, and only realised as I saw it disappearing off my screen that I had changed my Excellent to Very Poor - I apologise to all of you!) rating can drop the result of the overall calculation quite a bit if there are only 20-30 ratings. If there are 1000 ratings, individual ratings have much less impact.

I do not know the algorithm Terry uses to allocate a number to each of the five possible ratings and calculate the overall score (it could be as simple as 0, 1, 2, 3, 4; it could also be more complex). Once each quiz has its number, they get ranked and sunglasses appear next to the top whatever-the-number-currently-is of them.

Thanks LT!
I appreciate it!

Thanks for your reponse CmdrK.

Schrodinger's cat...funny!

To clarify the cutoff, it is not set at a percentage, but at a specific number, which Terry resets from time to time. When it is first set, the number is usually a bit more than 20%, then the number of quizzes grows, and at some point it is clearly less than 20% of the total online, so it gets reset. Reset times hand out lots of sunnies for quizzes near the borderline! But they may well sink below the cutoff again.

All this talk of Sunnies has me wondering, are we due for another reset soon?

There was a reset quite recently, I'm pretty sure.

Last one was only a few months ago, so it will be some time before the next one. Looking at the current numbers, the cutoff number seems to be 25600, which is almost exactly 20% of current online quizzes. We probably need another 10,000 quizzes to go online before the percentage drops low enough to make the next adjustment necessary. By my reckoning, about 13,000 more would make the current cutoff correspond to only 18% of online quizzes with sunglasses.

Thanks, Looney. i asked out of the blue without checking any data. I appreciate your indulging my question!

Wondering about when the next reset is due?

Would it be possible for editors to check older quizzes with sunglasses? I played one recently that didn't have full sentences in the question or II, and didn't use punctuation either. It seemed pretty average by today's standards. I know the editors already have lots to do, but it seems a bit unfair that some quizzes were highly rated when standards were lower, and newer quizzes that have a narrative or an interesting theme are pushed out of the higher rankings. I've seen quite a few sunglasses quizzes that read like they were written in about 5 minutes.

There's not much the editors can do in this situation because the quizzes were ranked (as you said) when there were lower standards in the editing process. The standards of the quiz players rating the quizzes were also lower, and these standards have become higher as quiz quality has improved.

What you can do is rate the quiz yourself what you deem to be fair. Eventually, enough players rating these quizzes by their current standards will see them go to a more appropriate ranking.

It's not necessarily an ideal solution, but it's the most fair we can make it.

And if there are any quizzes that have issues with grammar, punctuation, full sentences, etc. you can send a correction note and those issues will be dealt with.

Ok, thanks