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Author Topic: A neat page I found on QuizBusters question-writing  (Read 2115 times)

rjaguar3

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A neat page I found on QuizBusters question-writing
« on: July 03, 2013, 09:03:30 PM »

https://www.msu.edu/~murphyjp/work/QB.html\'>A page, which appears to be many years old, on how QuizBusters questions were written/compiled.



Matt Ottinger

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A neat page I found on QuizBusters question-writing
« Reply #1 on: July 04, 2013, 09:45:15 AM »

Compiled. not written.  Unless you believe that our answer to the question \"To be or not to be?\" is \"Why, a duck\"


 


We have a pretty massive database of some 5000 or more short questions that we use for our Lighting Round and for much of our Quick Ten.  There\'s nothing clever or elegant about the writing (\"Who was the second president of the United States?\" \"What element has atomic number eight?\") so we don\'t have a problem reusing them, but we needed a simple way to mix them up AND make sure that they\'re not duplicated within a season.  So Jim came up with this nifty little program.  All the questions are stored in it, plus more that we add each year, and once a year we randomize the whole set and print out the thousand or so that we\'ll need.


This has been another installment of Matt Ottinger's Masters of the Obvious.
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