Seeing that the VIT quiz was the only one among the three collegiate quizzes so far to have passed off without major incident and thus can be considered for debate without too much heat, this post is for opening a thread on various aspects of it. Please email me (quatrainman{at}yahoo{pointcom}) for adding to this, or leave your comments behind for inclusion.
My opening observations:
- Duration of the quiz was well handled.
- The questions erred on the side of being too easy.
- It was one of the tightest quizzes I have ever participated!
- Questions were too long - need to be pruned for the sake of both the person asking & the teams.
- Not sure why there were only very few subject rounds (Business, Entertainment) - either there should be more subject rounds or there should be none, IMHO. The quiz fell in between in that respect. Having a different round for non-text questions was fine though (such as the Visual connect rounds).
Niranjan:
VIT was a nice quiz, IMHO. The organizers definitely deserve an applause for commanding such attention (50+ teams, right?).
- I liked the elims. They had a decent mix of questions, though some the questions were pretty long.
- The much-discussed point about non-uniformity in difficulty level of questions was noticable. But it remains to be a universal problem, anyway.
- More than one person participated in the making of the quiz and it was evident. Definitely not a bad thing, but a common ground in terms of quizzing standards is very much desired.
- Perhaps one needs to be more organized to conduct such big quizzes.
Salil (one of the organisers):
Thanks Ramanand and Niranjan for the in-depth statistics and analysis (and also for making QUIZ-O-MANIA a great success).
First of all, the timing of the quiz (Saturday afternoon) was responsible for the large no. of teams (120+ ...we almost ran out of space and elims sheets!).
The quiz was set by 5 of us - Siddharth, Kunal, Ganesh, Anand and myself. As Niranjan points out, the difficulty level varied, which was because everyone's field of interest is different; so many questions were subjected to alterations as each one of us thought a particular question is way too tough when it wasn't.
Secondly, we didn't expect such a huge turnout at all, and as a result, we did have THE BEST TEAMS IN PUNE (though it was my wish that this should occur, we weren't prepared for this!). The level of the questions being toned down, they were literally demolished by all the teams (the stats show that only 3 out of 60 questions were unanswered). But I believe we satisfied the criteria of a good question - workable and interesting.
So what I've learnt is this:-
- When more then 2 persons are involved in the setting of the questions, do not consider any q too tough, or reframe to make it simpler.
- Estimate the level of finalists you are expecting.
- Decide the marking/splitups for each q, especially for connects.
- As far as long questions in elims are concerned, unnecessary crap irrelevant to the question should not be included just to make the q's interesting.
So guys, whats your opinion? And by the way if anyone needs a copy of questions, (elims and finals) just drop me a mail.
No comments:
Post a Comment