Tuesday 9 August 2011

Is an answer right, when the question is wrong??

Quizmasters can often get questions and answers wrong, its bound to happen at some point in their delivery of quizzes for a wide number of reasons and the mistakes can be excused, but the way in which the quizmaster handles them cannot.

This point comes from an occurrence at the quiz on  question was asked at the local quiz on Sunday. It began "Which British Female Singer..............."

We like some other teams clearly did not know the answers so like all quiz questions which we don't know we formulated a guess.......The way to do this obviously is to use the information "British Female singer". So we listed the ones we knew could be likely answers and came up with one.

The answers was..........Katy Perry who is of course American.

Everyone who put Katy Perry was marked right, everyone else was marked incorrect. When the answer was issued a few teams raised the obvious objection to which the question master replied....."yes but most teams got it anyway...............".

Surely the question should be null and void? Maybe if he didn't wrongly say she was British we would have come to that answer and then we would have got a fair question. Instead people who wrongly though Perry was British were awarded the point and in a very tight quiz this could make all the difference.

So even though the question was wrong the points won on the answer stayed and given the fact the quiz was won by one point, a tie for second and one team behind in third that one point mattered!

What are your opinions on this or similar question mistakes?

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