Today we’ve released a really excellent new quiz feature. There is now an option to enable wrong answers on quizzes. For example, now you can create (or play) a multiple choice quiz and you only get one try to get the answer right. We’re hoping that this makes for some really exciting new quiz styles, and we’re eagerly anticipating what our users will do with this new feature. We’ll be adding some information to our F.A.Q. here soon, but after the jump we’ve created a guide to show you how to make a wrong answer quiz of your own.
Right off the bat you’ll notice that there are two new options in the game creation center (as well as a slightly modified layout).
The first is ‘Bonus/Hidden Answers become wrong answers’. Checking this box enables the wrong answer mode. If a user enters a wrong answer with just this box checked, the answer will be counted as incorrect, but the person taking the quiz will still be able to guess other answers. Checking the second box ‘Wrong answers end the quiz’ means that when a wrong answer is entered, the quiz is immediately ends just the same as clicking the ‘Give Up’ button.
So How Does This Whole Thing Work?
As you might have inferred from the the box above, this type of quiz works by counting what we traditionally use as bonus (‘ee’) answers as incorrect. This means in a ‘wrong answer’ type quiz, that bonus answers will not work correctly. In this scenario the hint for the answer and its corresponding wrong answer must be the same. Here’s an example:
Lets say you’re creating a multiple choice quiz where the user has to guess an answer out of four, and your first question is. What is the capital of the United States?
| Hint | Answer | Extra |
|---|---|---|
| What is the capital of the USA? Washington DC, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles | Washington, DC | |
| What is the capital of the USA? Washington DC, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles | New York | ee |
| What is the capital of the USA? Washington DC, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles | Philadelphia | ee |
| What is the capital of the USA? Washington DC, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles | Los Angeles | ee |
As you can see, just like in a quiz where you have grouped categories, the hint has to be the same for both the correct answer and it’s corresponding incorrect answers. In a larger quiz, these bonus/wrong answers must also be sorted to the end of the quiz for the stats to tabulate correctly.
Final Thoughts
There are plenty of exciting options you can use for a quiz in this format, it can be as simple as a multiple choice, or even true false quiz, but it can be made much more complex with the addition of alternate answers (Alternate incorrect answers are accepted) and the ‘Wrong answer ends quiz’ option. In our testing, this option added a certain amount of drama to the quiz, as you really had to think about your choice before entering. As usual, please let us know if you have any thoughts or feedback.
This certainly makes the Millionaire-style quizzes work, but I’m having a hard time thinking of anything except variations on those quizzes that can use this format effectively. I am sure I will be proven wrong, however.
Oh, not to worry, hscer, I have things in mind. (For instance, “odd one out” quizzes, which people have tried but which just don’t work very well, since you can just guess all the options.)
But there seems to be a bug in it at the moment: it looks like it wants to put wrong answers in the very first slot in the quiz, which means that if you’ve gotten the first answer right, typing in a wrong answer (that’s marked with “ee”) simply does nothing.
…actually, it’s even weirder than that. Testing it on a new quiz, one without categories grouped together, it looks like if you get the first one right, and then type in a wrong answer, the following happens:
The wrong answer *overwrites* your first answer. The clock continues to count down. Further right answers are no longer accepted. Further wrong answers overwrite the previously-written wrong answer in the first slot.
I really love this feature, by the way, and I’m eager to see it working.
Won’t making a quiz in the “Wrong Answer Ends The Quiz” style really distort the number of plays for those quizzes. Anyone who really wants to finish the quiz may end up playing it 2, 10, 50 times. Is this going to be taken into consideration when counting a quiz’s plays? Can it be?
But of course that’s true for a lot of the current formats, like “hide the next question” and the bonus-answer-based Millionaire quizzes. So it’s not that new a problem.
I mean, it would certainly be interesting to, say, only count one play per person per 24 hours–so that if I come back to play “US presidents” every few days, it still counts each play, but if I play the same quiz five times in ten minutes trying to improve my score or reach the end, it only counts it as one play. I wonder if that can be done.