How hard is too hard?

[Brimtown]

This seems to be a very difficult, subjective question in determining how hard is too hard.

I created a quiz where every answer begins with either H,A,R, or D - answers are grouped by letter, so players always know what letter the answer starts with.

I also wanted to make the quiz fairly difficult, but not impossible. But therein lies the issue. For veteran Sporclers, many of the questions probably wouldn't be too difficult at all. However, for a casual player, they might be very difficult. Looking at the results, it looks like more than half of players are getting less than 50%. For a quiz that is supposed to be "hard", I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not. So far the ratings have been decent, but I haven't had many comments regarding difficulty. I'd like to see if some of you folks could take a look and let me know if I should replace some of the more difficult answers. Although, I find it difficult to believe that more people aren't getting the Edgar Allen Poe question - my wife thought that one should be one of the easier ones.


http://www.sporcle.com/games/brimtown/the-hard-quiz

[iglew]

You have two misspellings:  Norwegian and Allan (as in Edgar Allan Poe).  If you want to be picky, you could also put the umlaut on Ragnarök.

I'm probably not a good judge of how hard a quiz is, since I'm on the far end of the spectrum for general knowledge quizzes.  But on the general question of what's appropriate, I personally think it would be nice if there were more quizzes that were harder than the Sporcle norm.  I definitely don't think it's a problem if more than half of players are getting less than 50%.

Other than the misspellings, I think the quiz is perfectly fine the way it is.

[Caramba]

Bring on the hard quizzes! I find that quizzes published on Sporcle are relatively easier compared to some of the earlier ones 4 or 5 years ago.

Didn't know Poe or how to spell the Viking one.

[Aurora Illumina]

Actually, this is a question I want answers for as well, but I'm wondering for audio quizzes. What should the average score be? Is ~40% reasonable, or should I try to make them easier if possible?

(On another note, this published audio quiz by sbme has an average of 18%.)

[DesertSpartan]

Of course Caramba says " Bring on the hard quizzes!", he has created some very hard quizzes including one about incredibly obscure Canadian acts: http://www.sporcle.com/games/caramba/can_con.  I scored 9 of 41 on that quiz and I'm in the 82nd percentile.   There is nothing wrong with quizzes that are even that hard as long as the answers are correct and clear.  I loved that quiz and some other hard quizzes and that quiz has a good rating, but less than 100 plays.  I have found that hard quizzes tend to be unpopular and often low rated, but that does not mean they are not worthwhile. 

At times I remove a question from a quiz because it is hard (low percentage of correct answers), but at other times I have answers that less than 10% have managed to correctly answer on some of my quizzes.  In other words it is up to use to decide how hard to make your quizzes, but I also say "Bring on the hard quizzes!" (Caramba is quotable!)

[JoeBeta]

@Aurora Illumina - I guess I should at least answer your question although I have no control over whether a Clip Quiz gets an EP or a Publish. I could write several hundred pages about audio quizzes, but I am restraining myself. I don't believe that an average score is an important statistic. I do believe that every answer should be guessable by somebody somewhere other than the quiz creator. As far as music clip quizzes go, people in different countries will do better on different songs. Older people will do better with older songs. Younger people will do better with newer songs. A person who loves heavy metal will guess the heavy metal songs correctly in 2 seconds but have trouble recognizing a hip hop song when given a 20 second clip. As far as whether a clip quiz will be published, there are only 3 clip quizzes that I CPed that went on to be published. One quiz was featured in May 2014 and currently has only 6966 Game Plays. A quiz featured in March 2014 has only 10693 Game Plays. A quiz featured in October 2013 has only 9235 Game Plays. As far as the Sporcle Front Page is concerned, Clip quizzes get noticeably fewer Game Plays than every other kind of quiz. Audio quizzes are less popular than non-audio quizzes. I love audio quizzes and particularly music audio quizzes. It takes a lot of time and care to make a good audio quiz. Although creating quality audio quizzes may never result in a publish, there is a core group of Sporclers who love to play them. Hmmm ... I'm rambling ... oh well ... I've never seen (heard) an audio quiz that I myself felt was too easy. Audio quizzes are inherently hard quizzes, particularly for the general Sporcle public who only play Published Quizzes.

[Brimtown]

Thanks for all the feedback. Since 'HARD' is part of the title, I think people going into this quiz expect a certain level of difficulty, so I'll keep everything as is. Glad to see that it's enjoying pretty good ratings thus far.

[Bazmerelda]

According to this page, the most difficult quiz published by Sporcle is Video Characters by Minor Characters. Only 17.8% of players get the most guessed answer and 80% of players get less than 5% in the quiz overall. As Caramba says, the published quizzes tend to be a bit easier these days, so I doubt that kind of quiz would get published now. Difficult or obscure questions will often be removed from quizzes prior to publication if they are being answered by under ~10% of players, and every quiz in the Top 10 most difficult is from 2008 - 2010.

If anything, I'd say the H-A-R-D quiz deserves some even harder questions rather than making it any easier. So far all but one question has been answered by at least 20% of players.