Rare Entries Quizzes RULES

Can you identify a station from just a paving slab? Sadly, some people can
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tubeguru
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Rare Entries Quizzes RULES

Post by tubeguru »

OK, as a couple of people have expressed confusion as to how the scoring works with these quizzes, I am going to outline how they have worked on the forum in the past. Hopefully this will encourage more people to have a go at one.

First off, you need to make up ten questions. There can be a specific topic, or you can just choose anything. The important thing is choosing a question which only has a certain number of possible answers. For example, if you ask, "Name a species of bird" there's a good chance everyone is going to give a unique answer. So what you would do is narrow it down a bit to something like, "Name a species of Finch that is native to the UK". As a general rule, I tend to choose questions which have a number of possible answers between six and ten. If we had hundreds of people playing, then you could expand the choices a bit, but we simply don't have enough entries to justify this.

As to the scoring, this is how I do it for each question:

First, I count up how many people gave each different answer. So four people might have said X, and three people said Y, with only one person saying Z.

Therefore, everyone who said X scores FOUR points for that question. The people answering Y get THREE points each, and the person answering Z gets ONE point. This is all very well for correct answers, but there will be occasions where someone gives an incorrect answer to the question. If a player gives an incorrect answer then they score TWICE the highest individual score for that question. So, in our example above the highest score was for X - four points. Therefore an incorrect answer to this question scores EIGHT points. (If every player has given a unique answer for one particular question, then incorrect answers get off lightly, as their score will only be TWO points.)

Repeat this process for the other nine questions, and you will have TEN scores for each player. Each player's ten individual scores are then MULTIPLIED together to give their final score. This means that in theory a player's score can be 1 (1*1*1*1*1*1*1*1*1*1) - ten unique answers. This is only going to happen if you give a wide choice of answers to a question. Of course, there is nothing stopping you only allowing three or four choices for the questions, but the final scores will be closer, and a lot of people will have the same score.

And that's more or less it. Try not to leave loopholes in the questions, as people like me will exploit them and demand one point for a unique answer (see steeevooo's last quiz). His topic was the London Underground, and he asked the question, "Name a station that starts with a vowel". Now as he didn't specify a London Underground station, I answered "Aberystwyth" and got a point for it. I suspect he assumed that because the topic of the quiz was "London Underground" we would all ASSUME that he meant an LU station. Not so! So try to avoid things like that for your own sanity ...

So, that's about it. Oh, and try to set questions which are easy to research (Wikipedia is a good source). As I mentioned in another thread, I don't see these quizzes as a test of knowledge, but more a test of how well you can pick an obscure answer and second-guess the other players!

Good luck!
One thing only do I know, and that is that I know nothing - Socrates.

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