After a few weeks off I returned to a usual quiz on Thursday ran by a friend of mine. It is always a fun quiz, a much more socialable one than I usually go to as it is the closest thing I have to a regular and one usually rife with cheating...
Now the cheating does not usually bother me as much as in other quizzes as I consider this a tough quiz. The references, sources and sort of TV/Media covered is very specific to a certain age range of which I don't fall into, team sizes are usually massive and with 20 points falling across pictures and music it is not usually one I do well in. But I don't much mind.
However, this week I had what I refer to as "the night". Every quizzer will have one of these every so often where questions fall right, everything floods back and it just feels like the quiz was made for you. Even the pictures and music proved no challenge and even though the smallest team by far we raced through scoring much higher than usual and getting very few wrong.
We score 59/70. This would usually win easily every week (5 of those points are based on a bonus for getting all the wipeout questions right) so we dropped only 6 points and 3 of those were through hesitation to answer in a round where we could have been wiped out.
Anyway, I could see rife cheating, and I mean blatant cheating. App's used on phones to recognise songs, picture rounds passed round to non players etc
The worst thing of all, is despite our top score we could see who would win as it was a contest for who would cheat the best! A team of 6-7 players seemed to have a clear system of cheating. After every 3 questions one member would get up and a) go to the loo or b) head outside. It was beyond a joke as we realised what was happening! As soon as they were back they grabbed the pen and obviously wrote in the answer they had googled.
Annoyed is not the word.
As I said this is more of a social occasion with friends than some of the other quizzes I go to but it just makes a shambles of the whole thing. The team that won with 68 points clearly actually did not know anything as they had to google it all, dropped their only 2 points on the virtually ungoogleable pictures and got away with it. Why attend a quiz as an exercise only to cheat?
Anyway rant over and the quiz is one that I will still go to for social reasons but is far from something I will make an effort for.
I've fulminated against the evil practice of cheating by googling in quizzes often enough on LAM in the past, so I won't go over too much old ground here. Still, your post does beg one question, Dan. You said this quiz is run by a friend of yours. So what is HIS attitude to cheating in his quiz ? Did you speak to him after the quiz about what had happened. In my experience you can categorise question masters according to the way they react to phone cheating : -
ReplyDeletea) Those who ban it, and take immediate and effective action when they even suspect that it is going on
b) Those who ban it, and don't take immediate and effective action
c) Those who warn everyone not to do it, then have a go at you if you tell them it was going on
d) Those who tolerate it
e) Those who encourage it because they couldn't give a tom tit as long as the punters are buying drinks.
Where does your friend fit in, I wonder ? It doesn't take a huge amount if a question master is really determined to stamp it out, but if the QM won't do anything much, then you'll never stop it.
AS for why people attend a quiz only to cheat , well, that is a far more difficult question to answer. For the most part the people who do it would never dream of delioberately defrauding on their taxes, for the sake of argument. All I can think of is that they genuinely believe it is a different sort of game , where the point is coming up with the answer, no matter the means you use to get it. And the unfortunate thing is that when a QM allows people to do this without challenging them, and making it clear that their behaviour is unacceptable and won't be allowed, then who is to say that they are wrong ?
I'd just want to add, more as a rejoinder to Londinius's commet - I host one big quiz a week - 25 teams or more each week - in a massive venue and only one wired mic in a corner of the pub, behind the stairs. I can't see the punters too well and they can't see me too well. I warn people not to cheat, and if I suspect it's happened I will dock points.
ReplyDeletePeople afterward tell me X team was cheating - I look at their sheet, and quite often they've got things wrong that Google would tell them straight away, so did they just Google one answer? Two? How do you tell?
I know one team cheated (they got 59 out of 60 when the next highest score was 49) and when they return I'll be putting in a question only Google could tell them the answer to to catch them out.
Also, pulling people up on cheating isn't always an easy thing to do. You have to prove it. And even if you can prove it, sometimes you might get - as a quizmaster friend of mine did - a brick thrown through your pub window at 2am by one of the punters you accused of cheating.