Monday, May 28, 2018

The Pop-Culture Quiz - Report

Date - 20/05/2018
Set and conducted by Kunal Sawardekar
Format - 25 question elims, 36 question finals

Results
First - Team 5 - 
Aditya Gadre, Venkatraghavan Sahasranaman and Ranajeet Soman (draft) - 132.5 pts
Second - Team 2 - Rahul Kottalgi, Omkar Yarguddi, +1 - 80 pts
Joint Third - Team 1 - Aniket Khasgiwale, Venkatesh Srinivasan and Vibhendu Tewari (draft) &
Team 4 - Omkar Dhakephalkar, Pranav Pawar and Nadeem Ansari (draft)  - 75 pts

Other Finalists 
Anannya Deb (draft), + 2

Report

Kunal told us that the elims would be fairly simple and displayed a lesser seen side of the Dunning-Kruger effect where people with superior ability in a task assume it is equally easy for others. To put it simply, the elims were not at all simple and the spectre of self-doubt was haunting every quizzer present after the first few questions because nobody seemed to be getting anything. This improved in the latter half and questions became accessible. Ingit sir and Gadre topped the elims with an outrageous (for us) score of 14, with the main draw cut-off at 9 and the draft cut-off at 6.

The finals were really good with Kunal having hit his question setting stride. The quiz had due apologies to Faiz Ahmed Faiz as its tagline and there was no India shit. The western fundae were sufficiently popular to qualify as 'popular'-culture. The quiz had a decent amount of AV content which made it less taxing than dry quizzes tend to be. Team 5 picked up where they left off in the elims and were cruising throughout the quiz. Teams 1, 2 and 4 were reasonably close at the halfway mark before Team 5 pulled clearly ahead.

The only crib one would have was the difficulty level in the elims which could have been rectified with timely guinea-pigging. Apart from that, it was an enjoyable quiz. We hope Kunal turns this into at least a biennial event rather than a quinquennial one.

2 comments:

Kunal said...

Thanks Rana.

The point about not guinea-pigging the elims is absolutely well taken. Some of the questions in the quiz were guinea-pigged the night before the quiz, but the Elims / Finals division of questions hadn't even been done by then and as it turned out, none of the GP-ed questions made it to the elims. Mea maxima culpa.

That being said, as far as I recall, one one question in the elims went completely unanswered (the David Hasselhoff video question). Make of that what you will.

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