One of our setters was on holiday a few years ago, and entered three of the daily quizzes. Well since you ask, he did get the highest score each time but only claimed the prize once. However, that’s not the point of this tip.
In each of the quizzes the question master gave very broad hints to the questions he considered hard, rendering them quite easy. We’re sure he thought he was being kind to the contestants, but he was actually being unfair.
In a good quiz round of ten questions there should be a variety of difficulties. Three or four questions can be answered by virtually all the teams, and one or two are there to stretch the best teams. In this way everyone feels as if they’ve taken part, and the harder questions determine the winner.
By making the hard questions easy he was allowing more teams to answer more questions, but any team that knew the answer to a hard question was dismayed to hear the question master giving a huge clue to the correct answer.
Be very judicious in giving a hint after you’ve read the question. If you want to make the quiz a bit easier we will have another blog (How Hard can it be?) on how to alter the question before you ask it, which is an entirely different matter.