Does the Quizmasters Setting Ability Influence Cheating?

I have discussed the issue of cheating in pub quizzes on several occasions in this blog but after attending a quiz this week in which cheating is usually rampant, it did make me think of one aspect…..Can the quizzes with rampant  cheating be blamed on the quizmasters question setting ability?

The quiz in question is not so much hard in the sense of tough teasing questions, but it usually is a case of obscure questions on topics the general pub goer would not care about outside of the quiz. The questions in my view are pitched at a level totally averse to what is needed in the pub. Even the current affairs round is tough with much more than browsing the daily papers needed. It contains the hardest picture quiz I have known too!

This leads me to think, maybe just maybe, cheating in this quiz doesn’t just happen because teams want to win…..they maybe just don’t want to look stupid. It’s a busy quiz with regular teams galore but cheating is rampant. Every team, bar mine, pretty much cheats and the winner is always the person who has been able to google most effectively. But I think part of this may be due to the fact that the questions are too hard for the setting.

I am not in anyway being arrogant or disrespecting anyone involved in the quiz. Heck, the questions are often too hard for me and combined with the cheating we are rarely do very well. We compete against our score from previous weeks and as mentioned in a previous post this is more of a social quiz for me.

Because the questions are hard and obscure for 90% of the time, this means people worry about low low points. Sometimes a really low score will come in, 15/65 etc which you know is at least genuine but most teams don’t want that sort of score being read out so can only cheat to boost their score.

I heard the team on the next table last week discuss who was going to google what on the break, and their only aim was to make sure they got “about 40” so they won’t  last. 40 never wins, its around 20 points below the usual winning score, but 40 also is never last. So case in point, this team were cheating not to win but to avoid a low score….if the questions were easier and more appropriate, maybe they would not cheat!

The quizmaster is up against it in any quiz, anywhere in the country when it comes to facing up to and dealing with cheaters but at the end of the day the scenario above occurs elsewhere. Cheating will always happen, but maybe just maybe, the quizmasters ability to set an appropriate set of questions plays a bigger role than anything else!