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Pete's Next Trivia Nights: Radio Room on November 24th, 9pm

Pete's Trivia Guidelines... cardinal rules 1) quiz content should have an even balance of difficulty, accessibility, and pace. to test for difficulty, try it out on people who are generally intelligent but not about the specific categories. if they get too few or too many you need to adjust. remember not to cater to one background or skillset with your category mix. finally, fine tune the pacing by spreading out hard questions and easy questions with medium-level ones. be careful with pacing not to have too many long questions or questions that require lots of writing and deliberations (like a 5 or 10-part question asking people to list answers). 2) the point of a quiz is to mix fun and learning. your average participant should walk away from a quiz having learned a few interesting tidbits that might even spark new interests or at least be memorable. categories should not be dull and academic, but mix pop culture with more traditional topics. remember that esoteric knowledge should be balanced with embarrassing pop culture knowledge to allow people to laugh at themselves in a culturally acceptable way for knowing too much or too little about topics. considering this, of course, one should be careful not to turn the quiz into a public service announcement or soapbox. 3) administering a quiz is a responsibility. be fair and firm. above all - write questions that have one and only one definite answer. avoid grey areas by citing sources in questions that would otherwise be judgement calls. ("who are the 5 nerdiest Simpsons characters?" is bad. "who are the 5 nerdiest Simpsons characters according to salon.com in 2007?" is good). make consistent calls about what is acceptable for an answer - either be liberal or strict and stick to it. tips 1) writers should write what they know. quiz masters should take what they know and adapt it to the quizzing public. a category about heavy metal might bore or frustrate people who don't know anything about it. a category about heavy metal geography casts a much wider net of potential knowledge, letting more people have fun. 2) balance being strict with knowing your audience. drunk people need to know when to stop trying to argue for more points - but there is no sense ruining someone's chance for a tiebreaker round simply because of spelling or punctuation. 3) practice projection. not being able to hear or understand questions means people will ask for repeats or just give up and not have fun. zach's specific rules -4 categories. -10 questions each for 10 points each. -split questions with easily split points are fine (such as 2 answers for 5 points each; or 3 for 3 points each, 10 points for all 3 correct). -bonus questions are generally frowned upon. that's what a tiebreaker is for. -at least 3 tiebreakers or a lightning tiebreaker should be prepared for each category. -craft tiebreakers consistently. continue silent written rounds that you administer or bring elected group leaders together with an easy way to tell who gets to 'buzz' first. -ask if people need you to repeat any questions before moving on to trading and grading. terms: trade and grade - once a category is over and questions have been repeated to the contestant's satisfaction, groups trade thier papers to grade them. once traded, the quiz master reads the answers. tiebreaker - a question that is asked only to the groups who have tied at the end of the 'trade and grade' session.