These days I get to hear about more incidents of rigging happening in school quizzes in Delhi. And it’s a really sad situation. Some of the best quizzes which were there (like the Agnel Talent Fest Quiz) are either no longer being held because of sponsorship issues, or their standards have declined drastically (like so many computer symposium quizzes – and I’m talking about ones like Dynamix). It seems that more of these quizzes are being leaked by the organizers to favor either the host school, or some friend they have in other schools. What these people don’t see is how it hurts their own reputation, the reputation of their quiz and their school.
Take for example the Tagore International School (Vasant Vihar) Commties Quiz 2008 held today. Prateek Vijayavargia was telling me how it was rigged to such an extent that his team’s correct answers were marked wrong (it was shown to them) and still the organizers refused to mend their error. All of this just to ensure that the host school made it to the final round. They manipulated to the extent of increasing the host school’s scores to make them qualify.
Events don’t earn respect by giving Lenovo laptops as prizes or Domino’s Pizza for lunch – they earn it by having a fair competition of all teams with high standards. At Code Wars 2007 for instance we went to great lengths to ensure that a tight lid was kept on all information. Even when our members were participating and I made the papers for some events, utmost care was taken to see that nothing leaked out. And these days we have events where the organizers are actually leaking out things to other schools too! This sort of malfeasance hurts everyone.
BTW, Prateek’s put up a few posts on some recent quizzes he’s gone to. You might want to check them out for some quiz papers.
PS (off topic) – ln (2π)…LMAO!!!
PPS – Prashanth wanted me to add here that he was not involved in Dynamix 2008, but he was involved in Dynamix 2007.
39 replies on “Muck in the Delhi quizzing scene”
@ Ankur – Thanks for making the post because the Junta deserved to know whats happening on the quizzing circuit in Delhi. Its actually quite disappointing when things like these happen – And that 2 in front of u – Its just pure blatant injustice and brings a bad name to the organisers, school, students, etc. Having said that, lets not take credit away from Chirag’s team for winning the quiz because they did so in style and gave some brilliant answers in the finals (Mostly Commerce-Eco ones) and were deserving winners. But were all teams on stage deserving? Thats the question….Also, the Quiz lacked energy and there were so many goof-ups, some wrong answers, and basically lack of research and management. Preparing and Conducting Quizzes is also an art…And unfortunately the Quizmasters (or rather hosts who r just given cards with qns written on them to speak out) in most school quizzes can be really bad…
This happened at MODEM 2008 (modQuiz) – And the quizmaster in the finals had no clue abt things which were going on….But the quiz thankfully was not a very bad one.
@Espera – CodeWars is generally open (Most events are) as far as I know.
@Ramit – I appreciate your frankness and its okay to speak out the truth because after all, at the end of the day, its just a QUIZ…Its always better to mend your mistakes. Better Late Than Never.
The good part is that in fest like Exun, Code Warriors and many others there is a maintained level in fairness, and non-partiality. Most of the judges are also external, which helps. Its not good to have your current students as judges…So hoping for a better quizzing season ahead! 🙂
@Espera: ‘Open’ in the sense of Columban Open? No. Till last year, we allowed two teams per school; this year, it’s going to be one team per school. (The reason for that is that I’m sick of seeing a stream of papers with participants scoring 0 or 1.) CW is ‘open’ in the sense that anyone from any class can participate, but I guess that wasn’t what you were asking about. You’ll be coming?
@Prateek: I conducted the quiz and crossword last year at CW, and judged pretty much each event other than programming (of course, there were other judges too – each giving their own score). But we maintained a level where even our own members – wherever they participated – didn’t know what was coming.
Wow, makes me feel really bad about the current state of affairs, the only thing that happened to me was in MSVV when the judges had written my name as the second place winner but some smartguy changed it to DPS Mathura Road. Thankfully the judge had told me that it was supposed to be me and i got the things corrected.
@Ankit: Changing the result sheet given by judges?! :O Must’ve been a really bold to try something as smartass as this.
Prateek: Ah. So Ankur tells. But that wasn’t what I meant.
Ankur: Me coming? As much as I’d like to, I don’t think it’ll be possible. Why would the Exun Prez allow a less experienced quizzer to participate in one of the biggest tech … events (fest came to mind) ? Asthana wouldn’t.
I don’t know how good he is, but I can’t be better.
@espera : I don’t know abt. you but maybe you can team up with asthana…
asthana is a great tech guy, we’ve been in a quiz once. He completely stole the quiz with his quick answers on tech and computers, eventually beat us by a huge margin. we came 4th then (it was the matrix ecomm buzz quiz at MSM)
@Espera & Chirag: Asthana an ‘experienced’ quizzer? Don’t recollect it being so, in Code Wars 2007; he was totally clueless. But then, it was a tough quiz last year – if I remember correctly the total score of all teams on stage combined didn’t cross 100.
@ everyone: i wd like to add here. in e-spice 2007 we were actually asked by our teachers to rig the quiz-cross, despite our repeated attempts to convince them that there is abso-f***ing-lutely no reason to do that!! finally we had to, and trust me it was the first crossword me and my friend painstakingly created and it wasn’t fun at all.
here in IITM, though there is so much scope for rigging (the quizzes in tech-fest and cult-fest here are made by the students, and it might be their close friends who participate in the quiz), it usually doesn’t happen because i think here they appreciate “that smug feeling that you get when you answer a question in a quiz that no one gets”!
@Achyuth: I believe for anyone really interested in quizzing, it’s that smug feeling which counts for a lot. 😀
@ Achyuth – Thats sad. But then looks like people are finally opening up the closet on all rigged quizzes in the recent past….Looks like even teachers play a major role in “quiz-fixing”…..sometimes.
@ Espera – Hope ur doubts are cleared now…CW is an open event, as far as classes are concerned but there are restrictions on the number of teams involved. I guess the COQ is perhaps one of the very few school quizzes, which does not have “number of teams from a school” restriction – Which is nice, gives everyone a fair chance.
I believe its best not to discuss the Quizzing Prowess of Karthikeya Asthana here. Lets see what happens at CW 2008.
And Ankur is spot on – The happiness on cracking a connect or even a question which nobody else has got is one of the best parts of quizzing…