The Lemmings were at home to the Ox-Fford refreshed after being the previous week’s question
masters. They were back to full strength Wendy having returned for a short visit before jetting off again next day – there must be something in this retirement 
The questions had been set by the Dolphin and the Lemmings were very happy to begin with as we thought the first three or four rounds were very good indeed; after that however, they seemed to get much harder and the visitors began to pull away – this is not to say the questions were worse, just harder. The Ox-Fford eventually finished 31 points clear with 81 to the Lemmings’ 50.
The General Knowledge were more consistent and whilst the Lemmings still lost they put up a creditable performance with 82 points to the Ox-Fford’s 98
Individual scores were Bob 9/18, Wendy 12/9, Nick 9/21 and Tomo 12/18; conferred points were 7/11 with 1/5 pass-overs while the visitors collected 8/11 pass-overs – figures that tell their own story. Final score 179 to 132
Hull shared the same fate as the Lemmings but they were only stuffed by 5 the Lemmings by 47; and Maria Sharapova still looks fantastic. But it was a very pleasant and jovial evening rounded off with a fine selection of cheese and biscuits. Many thanks to Brian, the Ox-Fford and the put-upon question master.
5 comments:
After the efforts of the Dolphin to identify genuine female sporting achievement, not sure that Nick has stayed on-message...whatever happened to Anna Kournikova??
24 27 27 21 30 24 27 30, no not the vital statistics of selected members of an Olympic gymnastics team, but my own scores when doing the whole quiz from a spectator position (and I know that the Robins who played in my absence did a bit better than this). For someone who averages about 28 this year, this points to a not exactly easy quiz (for me, at least - and I suspect that I would have scored a few fewer in the heat of battle) but compared to similar on-line attempts in the past, an almost metronomic consistency. As such, congratulations to the Dolphin, Lord Flame and any other participants in the quest for balance.
It felt like a quiz (compared to the Park and Church House recently) where years of quizzing experience might count for a bit more than good current affairs knowledge and the demands on Geographical and cultural knowledge seemed testing at times. I felt that the specialists progressively got more vicious - Lions and Tigers was fine, two-word phrases was good fun, the ship-themed one was pretty horrendous for me.
My gut feel is that this is a good example of a 7/10 quiz - balance achieved, difficulty not too far off normal but a glance in the WGT bag suggested that whilst some of our top quizzers passed with flying colours, there were also a few heavy casualties as well - along with one surprising and indignant swipe at "very poor balance" which may be most favourably read as a reminder that one man's/team's meat can be another's poison. If one was prone to betting, I would have lost some money on the B league on Tuesday - but there were a few "usual suspects" missing - which is one reason why judging a quiz on team scores is not a perfect system.
Very few quibbles could be made on the questions - "Collateral Damage" was helpfully accompanied by a date to distinguish it from "friendly fire". I always thought that Shirley Bassey came from "Tigers Bay" in Cardiff, which could be confused with a gritty Loyalist enclave in North Belfast, but no - it is Tiger in the singular.
So - a successful exercise in quiz setting from some seasoned hands, though not one that left me cursing my own absence.
Pleased to let you know that I have provided a link from the Questions page (right-hand side marked "spreadsheet" - this takes you to Glyn's spreadsheet (only because that was mentioned first) - tested OK but if there's any problem please let me know
I'm glad to see that AAD found the quiz balanced. When I was sent the questions for vetting, I was asked to check that they were balanced for each position. Like Alan, I got a score within my range for this season in each seat.
I then asked the questions to the rest of the Academicals and annotated them with a tick if we got it conferred, a zero if no one got it or an H if we wondered if anyone would get it
There were no "Gimmees" in there, but no armadillos either, so it would have favoured the stronger quizzers, particularly those whose leanings were more classical or academic than popular
The spreadsheet will be a useful tool for checking balance, viewing questions without answers for the first check and automatically numbering the final set.
Last week, Glyn noted how important it is to allow adequate time for setting and vetting. Maybe the reminder and spreadsheet should be sent out a couple of weeks earlier next season
Thanks Nick. I'll dig out the Word document and include some instructions about how to run the mail merge. The point of the Word doc is that it should create a Q1, A1, Q2, A2,... listing with a gap between each question/answer pairing. For specialist rounds it's not too hard to insert headers between each 10 questions (8+2supps) and reset the numbering for each round.
I should be clear though that the spreadsheet/Word combination is simply a way to view the questions from different players'/teams' perspectives, and produce a nicely formatted set of questions. It doesn't say what sort of questions to put where - I think that is something Liz's husband's spreadsheet does do.
As Nick says, a very pleasant evening was had at the Waters Green in our game against the Lemmings. The pub was unusually quiet for a Tuesday apart from one lady at the bar who was anything but. That said, all concerned rallied round and got through – Stuart from the Dolphin did an excellent Question Master job to rise above any distractions and the lady in question seemed to have a great time too, not that she would have noticed us!
The cheese selection at the end was very nice indeed; I’m still trying to get my arteries to widen out a bit again…
I thought the questions were very well-balanced this week. They were by no means easy overall, but each seat had a good mixture of the gettable and not so gettable. 36 was the best individual score in our game and 48 the best achieved by anyone in the League (Haydn Thompson) on the night.
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