Educational Quiz Contest Criteria: Round 1, Part 2
Our criteria for this round are based on the contest task, as initially announced: “creating original educational quizzes on any subject with at least 30 questions with explanations.” To get a chance for a prize in this round, Quizzes have to be:
1. Educational. The subject can be anything at all, but every Quiz must teach you something instead of just checking what you know. To do this, authors should use explanations that help students understand why the correct answer is right (or the incorrect answer is wrong), pre-poll messages that tell you more about the subject and add context, links to articles and videos with further information – and so on. Naturally, Quizzes also shouldn't contain wrong information.
2. Original. Quizzes must be made by the person who uploaded them. Taking questions, answers and explanations that were made by others from books or websites is not allowed. If media is used in Quizzes, copyrights should be respected (including attribution requirements for free-license media). If Quizzes include materials for further studies, preference is likely to be given to Quizzes where this additional content was also made by the author.
3. Tidy. Bad formatting, poor language and low quality media can make it difficult for students to interact with Quizzes. While a typo or two is not the end of the world, Quizzes that look like a mess or use broken language are very unlikely to win.
Evaluation Process
After completing the disqualification checks described in the first part of this document, our Judges moved on to finding and highlighting areas of strength. Each Quiz that was not disqualified in the first phase received up to 5 unique evaluations from different Judges.
Additionally, we allowed 1 month for all authors of disqualified Quizzes to submit an Appeal. Each Appeal was processed by an independent Judge and each Quiz – if the Appeal was successful – had as much of a chance to receive a prize as any other non-disqualified Quiz.
This document details a simplified version of the criteria that our Judges used to nominate Quizzes with good attributes. It's important to note that just demonstrating one or more good attributes did not guarantee that a Quiz would receive a prize, many other factors were combined to form the overall Contest Score.
Detailed Criteria for Nomination
Quizzes which demonstrated to a strong enough degree any of these good attributes received a comment, with details of the nominations. Some Quizzes did not get a public comment, but all of them were carefully evaluated.
Note that if your Quiz had nominations, this did not automatically guarantee that it would receive a prize in this round. But it did make receiving a reward more likely.
1. Educational explanations
2. Educational pre-poll messages
3. Unique idea
4. Relevant self-made media
5. Creative formatting
6. Valuable service
7. Step-by-step teaching style
Not quite good enough
Each of the criteria below also list examples of approaches that we considered not quite good enough for a nomination. Unlike with disqualification, a Quiz which was “not quite good enough” in a certain aspect could still get top marks – just for something different.
1. Educational explanations
Quizzes which have educational and original explanations that teach the student the reasons why the correct answers are correct and/or why the wrong answers are wrong. If educational explanations are present for most questions, but there are also a few basic explanations, this is acceptable.
The explanation field has a character limit, authors could use links to more detailed explanations made by the author (for example, on Telegra.ph, or in a Telegram channel). If that text (or video) teaches the reasons for the correct/incorrect answers, this approach is acceptable.
Not quite good enough:
- a. Explanations consisting of random facts, not directly related to the reasons why answers are correct or not.
- b. Explanations containing text copied from elsewhere or relying completely on third party sites. It is okay for an original explanation which explains the answer to contain optional links to third party content.
2. Educational pre-poll messages
Quizzes which have detailed and original pre-poll messages (text or media that appear before the question) that educate, supply additional context, turn the Quiz into something similar to a lecture or class.
Not quite good enough:
- a. Pre-poll messages that give motivational or entertaining comments irrelevant for the questions.
3. Original Quiz with unique idea
Quizzes with an unusual idea, extraordinary and unexpected things. For example, a Quiz that introduces a regular topic from a new unexpected angle, or successfully teaches things you didn't think you'd learn from a Quiz.
Not quite good enough:
- a. Simply making a Quiz without copying anyone. This was expected from all Quizzes.
4. Relevant self-made media
Quizzes for which authors made their own photos, videos or other media may deserve a higher rating – but only if the images or videos are relevant for the subject: used as questions, illustrate concepts, increase the educational potential of the Quiz, etc.
Not quite good enough:
- a. Adding self-made media as illustrations but they are not related to the subject of the Quiz.
- b. Combining several images together or applying minimal effects.
5. Creative formatting
Explanations and pre-poll messages support the full range of formatting available on Telegram: bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, text URLs, monospace and code blocks. Some Quizzes might get top marks for going beyond this and using formatting to achieve unexpected and impressive results.
Not quite good enough:
- a. Simply using font styles (bold, italic) or emoji to improve readability.
6. Valuable service
Quizzes that have particular “in real life” value for students, providing comprehensive knowledge for a certain situation or a particular exam, helping carry out a particular task, etc.
Not quite good enough:
- a. Quizzes with random exam questions for extra training.
- b. Quizzes that only give you fragmented facts about an important matter.
7. Step-by-step teaching style
Quizzes that teach or introduce concepts gradually during the Quiz, or take a step-by-step approach building upon knowledge in earlier Quiz questions. This is a great way to help students not only learn new information, but remember it as well.
Not quite good enough:
- a. Quizzes that teach you random things about the topic.
- b. Quizzes that simply check your knowledge.
Note on Shuffle Mode: The key thing here was that the original order that the Quiz questions were added in showed signs of a step-by-step approach. So, even if the Quiz questions are shuffled when taking the Quiz it is still possible to meet this criteria. Some users enabled Shuffle Mode by accident, and our Judges had access to the original order of questions.
You can view all of the Winners from this page:
https://quiz.directory/winners
Collecting your reward
If you won a prize in this round of the contest, you will receive a message from @QuizBot with detailed instructions on how to collect your prize. Please follow these instructions carefully and note that you should send your details not to QuizBot, but to the Telegram account that is specified in the message you get.
We have to send out more than 1,000 prizes, and apologize in advance for any delays while we're processing all the related payments. We expect everyone to have received their prizes by the end of August – with the first arriving as early as next week.