Pointless rant of the day
Jul. 28th, 2002 05:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tahnanOnline 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.
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.