Title: Question optimisation: building quiz bowl tournament sets

Authors: Kara L. Combs; Trevor J. Bihl

Addresses: Department of Biomedical, Industrial and Human Factors Engineering, Wright State University, 3640 Col. Glenn Hwy., Dayton, OH, 45435, USA ' Department of Biomedical, Industrial and Human Factors Engineering, Wright State University, 3640 Col. Glenn Hwy., Dayton, OH, 45435, USA

Abstract: Quiz bowl is an activity in which players test their knowledge against others in tournaments. Quiz bowl set organisation is a lengthy and involved process involving many expectations related to the set's content and quality. Current techniques to address question placement rely on lengthy, manually-edited databases, if any. Ensuring a set meets all expectations is vital to producing a high-quality set that is suitable for competition. We propose a repeatable methodology for optimising question placement implemented in both Python and Excel to be compared to the traditional manual method. On the initial data, the baseline manually-produced set was matched qualitatively by the other methods, which also had repeatability, traceability, and reduction of time spent. These results were furthermore supported by a three-way comparison of a portion of the real-world 2022 state competition questions by the Head Editor, who recommended the Python version for future use.

Keywords: quiz bowl; quizbowl; optimisation; simplex linear programming; placement.

DOI: 10.1504/IJDATS.2024.142487

International Journal of Data Analysis Techniques and Strategies, 2024 Vol.16 No.4, pp.386 - 409

Received: 26 Sep 2022
Accepted: 26 Nov 2023
Published online: 04 Nov 2024 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article