The anatomy of a quiz

How do you go about creating a quiz? Broadly speaking, you need questions, contestants, a host, and a format.

Question setting is among the more time-intensive tasks while developing a quiz. You need original questions, though you may take inspiration from questions you have encountered in the past as well. But care must be taken to ensure you do not rely on only a few websites or books as your sources. If some contestants were to prepare for the quiz by using the same sources, they would have an unfair advantage. You can also call on the services of quiz setters (often your local city quiz group or open group) to help provide you with the questions. The questions may be grouped into rounds, each round typically centring on one theme or topic. Care must then be given to the topics you have in mind. Too much focus on niche topics risks alienating members of the audience.

The host is the quizmaster, who is a key component of any quiz. Not only is the quizmaster responsible for asking the questions, moderating the quiz, and providing answers, but he or she is also responsible for keeping the contestants as well as the general audience engaged. How well the quizmaster should know the topics of the questions is a matter of debate. Quizmasters do not typically set the questions themselves, especially for large quiz events, but they do need to have some level of awareness of the subject matter to be able to adjudicate contested answers or point out why a certain answer is incorrect. The flash cards (or, now, tablets) quizmasters carry for their questions can include all the additional information needed for such situations. A famous quizmaster can make a quiz event bigger than it already is.

Contestants are drawn in according to the nature of the quiz. By their nature, specialized quizzes such as College Bowl restrict their pool of contestants to students of participating colleges. Likewise, corporate quizzes allow teams only from registered companies. Open quizzes, on the other hand, are open to all. Team sizes are determined by the format of the quiz as well. Academic quizzes typically have relatively large teams (three or four members each). The BBC’s Mastermind is the best example of a solo quiz. Team sizes depend on how many teams can be accommodated, how many will be part of the staged rounds, and how difficult the questions will be.

Bells and whistles can be added in the form of timers and buzzers, especially for use in speed-based rounds, in which all teams or individual contestants vie at once to answer the same question and the fastest one to the buzzer wins the points for answering correctly (or loses them for answering incorrectly). Timers ensure that contestants do not take an inordinate amount of time to provide answers.

Points are awarded in a quiz when contestants (whether individuals or teams) provide answers: positive points if correct, negative if incorrect. In a face-off (one-on-one) quiz, the right to answer typically goes to the contestant who first sounds a buzzer or otherwise signals that he or she can answer the question. For a quiz with more than two contestants, the contestants take turns answering the questions, often in a round-robin format. A team-based quiz using this format would proceed as follows: Team One is asked a question (its direct question) and receives points for answering correctly. If that team is unable to answer correctly or chooses to pass, the next team (Team Two) gets to try, and so on until a team answers correctly or all teams have passed. To ensure that all teams in a quiz using this format get roughly the same number of answer attempts—something that might not happen if one team is particularly strong and simply answers all the questions—quizzes may use a rule called infinite bounce (or infinite rebounds): when, for example, Team Two answers a question correctly, the next question is directed to Team Three, which is the team that immediately follows Team Two in the sequential order of the quiz. The practice of “pouncing” may also be used in a quiz to ensure that no team draws an unfair advantage from being the recipient of very easy questions. If, for example, Team One does not answer its direct question within a certain period of time, the other teams may “pounce” on the question, the first to do so thereby gaining a chance to get points for a correct answer.

Audience participation is also key to a successful quiz. Some questions directed to the audience during the event will help keep audience members engaged. And once all the questions—for the audience and the contestants—are answered, the team or individual with the most points wins.