Recently, we have dealt with "what makes a bad question" in a Blog Post, which can be read here That's a Good Question - Part 1. We would now like to move on to the attributes of a good question - a slightly harder topic!
The first and often most contentious thing about questions is the degree of difficulty. However, difficulty cannot be dealt with for individual questions; it is the combined difficulty of the ten questions that make up the quiz round that really matters.
For a round of ten questions you need six that are reasonably accessible. Most of the teams should be able to answer all of them and all of the teams should be able to answer most of them. In this way you won't have teams giving up and going home (and not coming back!) because they have answered five questions in the first three rounds.
After that you need two questions that around half the teams can answer, one which a few teams can answer, and one that only one or two teams can answer. These four questions sort out the very best team from the other good teams.
So, there is a place for difficult questions in a quiz, just not very many of them. Although, as we said in the previous Blog Post, a question that is impossible to answer is a very bad question, and should never be used.
We think that good questions should be interesting, the answer is not actually known by anyone, but the answer can be worked out with a little bit of thought. We will consider these in turn.
In a recent quiz one of our team asked the question "What is the only integer that is one more than the square of an integer and one less than the cube of an integer?". As it happens, this has all three attributes, as no one is really going to know this, but several teams worked out the answer. However, the fact that it is the ONLY integer with this feature piqued the interest of several quizzers, and there were a few conversations about this during the interval.
Another question we have used is "What unit of area can be made by removing one letter from a word in this question?". Again, no one can possibly know this answer, but several teams worked it out. Maybe not as interesting as our first example, but it has the second attribute in spades and can be worked out?
The last question is the writer's personal favourite: "Bohemian Rhapsody does not contain its title in its lyrics, but does contain the title of the song that succeeded it at Number One in the UK charts - what is that song?". The coincidence that allows this question to be asked is really interesting, no one ever knows the answer, and about one person in three can work out the answer. With the added bonus that the answer is such a well known song that no one can claim not to have heard of it.
So there you have it; our thoughts on what makes a good question. We are sure that you will have your own ideas, and we would love to hear them.