Top-Quiz.com - How to Write an Online Quiz

How to write a quiz

1. Define who your audience is
2. Give the quiz a title and describe what it does
   "Are you a Karate expert? Take this quiz to find out how well you know your stuff!"

Match your questions to your audience

• Your audience is usually a particular demographics that has come to a particular web site and found your quiz.
• If they are somewhat experts in that field, avoid questions that are too trivial.
• If you use difficult questions, make sure the ability to answer a question adequately reflects a depth of knowledge rather than just chance knowledge.
• Avoid question or answers that do not match the theme of the quiz or the site. Example: A soccer quiz should not contain references to water polo.
• Avoid tech jargon or insider jargon. Expect that non-experts take the quiz.

Check anwers for current and FUTURE correctness

• Make sure there is only one really correct answer. Avoid answers that are half true or somewhat true or could be argued about. The incorrect answers have to be really incorrect, without possible argument about it.
• Make sure an answer that is wrong now can't become true in the future. (Bad example: Who of the following actors appears in a computer game?)
• Avoid references to "recent events" as every quiz is meant to withstand the test of time and must still make sense months or years later. (Bad example: Which team won the superbowl last year?)

Anti-Cheating:

• Avoid a pattern in the order of the correct/incorrect answers. This is something you can check once you have completed your quiz and you have a visual quick check.

Make it interesting:

• Use your most interesting question first! Make the first question relatively easy to invite people to actually begin taking the quiz.
• Vary the difficulty of the questions (you could consider using different point values for each question) to keep the quiz interesting. A quiz that appears overall too easy is boring and one that seems to be impossibly hard is deterring too.
• Varying the number of possible answers makes the quiz more interesting and typically creates different types of questions. For example, 2-answer-questions have a different "feel" than four answer questions. Besides, it is often quite difficult to come up with reasonable and yet wrong answers.

How to address your audience - watch your writing style!

• Do not offend your audience. Make each question/answer as inoffensive and politically correct as possible. Same for the quiz result actions. Be sincere. If you need to be humorous, still try not to be scolding or insulting.
• Keep each question and answer as short and concise as possible - no waffling.
• Avoid zaniness in your question style. Rather make the questions really clear, without jokes and puns. Same for the answers - no puns or obviously totally incorrect answers.
• Each answer should have a real chance for being correct, otherwise the answer could as well not be there.
• An exception is the humorous answer that is just added for its entertainment value. You can always add an humorous answer to a set of reasonable incorrect answers, but do not make the humorous answer be the only choice of incorrect answer.

Formatting

• Ask questions like questions and put a question mark at the end.
• Use sentence capitalization (just like in this sentence).
• Capitalize proper names, for example the Star Wars movie that came out in December 2001.
• Don't use more than 10 questions per page (unless they are very short, with 2-anwser questions).
• Distribute the quiz questions evenly over the pages.