Pointless rant of the day

[tahnan]

Online quizzes. OK, yeah, I take them, they're fun. But.

They should be coded better than some of them are. For instance, I just took the What's Your Sex Sign? quiz(*), which I thought had other problems as well ("If your partner suggested trying a threesome, you would:: () I would have probably already suggested it. I'm 100% bisexual." What, homosexuals can't have threesomes?), but the evaluation method is seriously flawed.

(1) There are n possible outcomes; each question has n possible answers, each of which scores one "point" for a different outcome. Well, that's silly; each answer should increase the likelihood of some outcomes and decrease others, and not necessarily by the same amount for each.

(2) At the end, the quiz says, "OK, assume outcome 1. Is outcome 2 greater than the highest so far? If so, 2 is the new outcome. Is outcome 3...?" Which means that the last outcome checked is far less likely, since the first ones checked arbitrarily win ties. (This quiz in particular had seven questions; if I answered to match seven different signs, I'd've arbitrarily gotten the first one on their list. Or if I'd given three Pisces answers, three Aries, and one Virgo, I'd be Aries, because it gets checked first--but what makes me actually more Aries than Pisces?)

(Other quizzes, such as "What Element Are You?" and--sorry, Dan--"What Dan Katz Song Are You?" have this problem as well, presumably because they have the same code.)

Compare this to, say, What are you in the World of Darkness?--view the source to see how it works, or take the quiz and note that it ranks you in each possible outcome on a scale of, I believe, -17 to 17.

Anyone designing a quiz, take heed. All right, class dismissed, you may go now.

(*) No, I'm not telling you what I came out as (no pun intended). No, there are no points awarded for guessing right. Especially to exes.

Comments

[thedan.livejournal.com]

My test does indeed have those problems, and I'm aware of them... But it'd be really hard to add in an intelligent tiebreaker system or answers that affect more than one result. Especially when, like me, you're simply ripping off other people's code.

My personal pet peeve is quizzes where the answers to each question are sorted by corresponding result in the same order. Like a Hitchhiker's Guide test I took once where it became exceedingly obvious that the 5th answer to every question was the Marvin answer, etc. On my test, I scrambled up the answers.

And I'm sure homosexuals can have threesomes, but I'm betting all the bisexual answers were Gemini answers. Or something.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Actually, the bisexual answers seemed to be Libra answers (he said, having just looked at the code). The Gemini answers were more the "I'll try anything" answers--to that one, it was something like "I'd rush right out and find someone, as long as it was guy-guy-girl." I wasn't sure I actually understood that answer--I mean, assuming that the person answering is in a male-female relationship, does that mean that a Gemini male is more interested in bisexuality, but a Gemini female is more interested in more partners? Or something like that. Actually, I'm guessing--from the half-naked woman at the top of the page and the fact that the results page contained links to porn sites--that the quiz is aimed at heterosexual males. Feh, feh, feh.