Cheating in quizzes is nothing new but if you don’t act it can ruin your event and drive honest quizzers away. No matter what you do you’re unlikely to be able to guarantee that there will be absolutely no cheating, but if you follow these guidelines you can make it as hard as possible and hopefully send the cheaters to someone else’s quiz! The first step in deterring the cheaters is to make a quiz that they will hate so we’ve come up with a few suggestions to help you on your way.
1. Prizes That Don’t Break The Bank
Don’t go over the top with prizes, the idea is for players to have fun not make money. Having excessive prizes can encourage people to take a chance and cheat on the odd question. Remember you’re hosting a pub quiz, not who wants to be a millionaire!
2. Keep It Short & Sweet
When you set the question timer consider how long you think it could take to come up with an answer, give them enough time to discuss and argue about the answer but not enough time to check Wikipedia.
3. Prizes For Observation
With Crafty Quiz you can attach videos to your questions so you could make observation questions. Just play a video on the Big Screen and then ask one or more questions about it, that way your teams can’t ask Alexa!
4. Get Cryptic
It is pretty much impossible to ‘Google’ cryptic questions so why not include a few of them in your quiz. For example Which UK city sounds like someone who is leaving? Answer: Exeter (Exit er)
5. Think Laterally
Like cryptic questions, lateral thinking questions are almost impossible to ‘Google’ so it could be good to include a few in your quiz. For example: Question: What can you put in a box to make it lighter? Answer: Holes
6. Distort Your Pictures
If you’re using pictures there’s lots of websites like www.photo-warp.com where you can distort images to make them harder to search for. You could also use the picture reveal function in the software where a picture is slowly revealed on the Big Screen.
7. Get Connected
You could ask four questions and then ask what is the connection between the four answers or you could just give three or four things and ask for the connection between them. It is almost impossible to ‘Google’ connection questions.
8. See Who’s Winning
When you read out the scores between rounds, identify the leaders, you could just say ‘Give us a shout or a wave’. Then the whole pub will know who they are and even better still, they know that everyone in the pub will be watching them.
9. Confuse Google, Alexa and Siri
When you read out your questions you can put pauses in or ask them in a way that stops the assistant from understanding the question for example instead of asking ‘What is the capital city of Australia?’ ask ‘Australia’s capital city is known by what name?’
10. Rearrange The Letters
You can also throw in a few anagram questions because Wikipedia won’t help your teams with them but be aware that there are websites and apps which can solve anagrams really quickly so don’t give your teams long to answer.
11. Trick Them
Trick questions are really hard to look up and they’re a great way to catch your teams out and can be really funny so why not include some in your quiz? For example: Some months have 30 days, some have 31, but how many have 28? Answer: 12 (they’ve all got 28 days in them)
12. Stop Shazam!
The app, Shazam can identify a song from a few seconds but if you play it slightly faster or slower it won’t work. You can use free online tools like www.audiospeedchanger.com to do this. You can also play songs backwards or play two songs at the same time and ask for the artist.
So you’ve created your cheat proof quiz now you need to set some rules but don’t forget to make sure all your participants know them and most important of all . . . enforce them! We’d suggest using the following rules and we’ve made images that you can send to your participants during your quiz to highlight them.
The quiz master is always right!
Don’t shout out answers during the quiz.
Only one device out on the table or in a participant’s hand during the quiz, lose 20 points immediately if not!
If you need to take or make a call get up and leave the team.
Once you’ve decided on your rules, make sure you enforce them! If possible, walk around the venue to keep an eye on all of your teams and also ask bar staff to keep watch again, especially on teams which you can’t see. If you do catch someone cheating, be tough and I mean really tough! You could deduct points, disqualify them from the quiz or even ban them from future quizzes!
When other teams see you being tough on cheats it will deter them from cheating and it reassures people that you take the issue seriously, especially when prizes are at stake. At the end of the day the most important thing is to encourage people to take part, interact fairly and enjoy the night meaning that they will come back again next week.