Sunday 17 August 2014

Question setting/writing

Blimey, am I the only one who thinks that question setting is actually really difficult and time consuming? It makes you realise how much hard work someone like Alan, who runs the weekly Monday night quiz I attend, really puts in week after week.

In one respect I'm lucky because on here the only person I have to satisfy is myself. The flipside of that is that I'm a real perfectionist. I'll look at something I've written and think is that too easy or too hard, can I phrase it better? I also seem prone to go overboard with detail, so that when I just ask a simple one line question it just doesn't look right and I end up scrapping it.

Anyway enough of all that, only one quiz to report on from last week. Here are a few questions from Monday night, some of which we failed on totally or which I didn't know but a teammate did. Answers are of course supplied at the end plus a little self justification!

1 Translating into English as 'An ornament and a safeguard', where would you find the Latin inscription Decus Et Tutamen?

2 North Western and Wallgate are two railway stations that serve which town?

3 The nickname of which football league club is 'The Glovers'

4 Which was the first book in the Mr Men series of books written by Roger Hargreaves? As this came up during a round called Choices, you have the choice of a) Mr Happy, b) Mr Bump, c) Mr Tickle or d) Mr Messy

5 What is measured by a galvanometer?





Answers:

1 On the edge of a pound coin. How we got this chesnut wrong I've no idea, somehow we got hooked on the idea that the translation meant the object in question was both an ornament and safeguard and from there our thinking just spiralled into all kinds of madness.

2 Wigan. Alan really loves his train trivia, so this type of question comes up far more regularly than it should in my opinion. However, this time we struck trainspotter gold when it turned out that Sandra was brought up near Wigan, well just outside Blackpool, though surely that's the same thing isn't it?

3 Yeovil Town. The home grounds and nicknames of football clubs, particularly those in the third and fourth tier, are something you should probably take the trouble to know, in this instance we hadn't.

4 Mr Tickle. Not much to say really is there?

5 Electric current. From my school days I narrowed it down to voltage or current, and went with voltage...

There was no Mastermind this week because of the European Athletics Championships. It returns on Friday with the specialist subjects including The Thick Of It, Eric Clapton, British Poetry and T.E. Lawrence. Now I've never seen The Thick Of It, and British Poetry seems an awfully big subject to take on to me, so I'll be hopeless on both of those. I reckon I could rustle up a few points with no preparation on Slowhand, so I may just set myself a little Wiki challenge on Lawrence of Arabia.

Have a good week.


2 comments:

  1. Hi Ian,

    I’ve always thought that question setting is a craft, and crafts are things in which there is no substitute for a bit of time and effort. You are dead right in my opinion to focus on the phrasing of your questions. For me it is the most neglected tool in the average question master’s toolbox, yet it’s an absolutely vital one. For example, I was recently asked – In the sitcom Porridge, who was Ronnie Barker’s cellmate? Looks like an easy question to answer – but it’s deeply flawed, and as it stands you cannot guarantee that you will supply the right answer, even if you know it.
    • IT said ‘Ronnie Barker’s cell mate. Yet Ronnie Barker was the name of the actor, not the character. So did it want the name of the cell mate, or the actor who played him?
    • The question supposes that he only had one cell mate. He had one main cellmate for most of the series, yes. But at the start the two of them also shared a cell with Cyril Heslop, played by Brian Glover.
    • So – the question as asked could theoretically have four possible answers – Lennie Godber – Richard Beckinsale – Cyril Heslop – Brian Glover.
    All the confusion could have been avoided with a little more care and thought given to the way that it was actually phrased.

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  2. Hi Dave

    Thanks for posting.

    Blimey your spot on with Brian Glover, I'd completely forgotten about him.

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