It isn’t all about Google-proofing your quiz questions

One of my Facebook friends posted a link to a story in the Manchester Evening News: “Quizmaster devises Google-proof questions to stop pub quiz smartphone cheats”

It makes a decent feature but in my view it isn’t news. As the comments on the article suggest (and as readers of this blog will know), quizmasters have been using this sort of content for many many years.

And, as we will discuss in subsequent posts in our series on quiz cheating, there is far more to preventing cheating than having Google-proof questions. In fact, counter-intuitively, one of the techniques used by our QuizMasters to prevent cheating is the exact opposite of having Google-proof questions. If you can start the quiz with a selection of questions which would be easy to find on Google (or any other cheating means) BUT are engaging enough and interesting enough and gettable enough that players and teams realise the enjoyment is in working out that they know them, then you are onto a winner. Players discover that the fun is in the challenge of working out that they know the answers (or can work them out) without resorting to naughtiness.

More on this specific point and other quiz cheating thoughts in the very near future!