Setting A Quiz For An International Tournament

Writing questions for an international audience is quite a challenge but after four years, the IQA team is pretty skilled at it!

The process starts over 6 months before the World Quizzing Championships with setters from around the world (Chris Jones - UK, Steven De Ceuster - Belgium, Arko Olesk - Estonia, Anurakshat Gupta - India, Ray Hamel - USA, Sandy Wood - Mental Floss Magazine, USA, and Ruwan Senanayake - Sri Lanka) writing FOUR times as many questions as required.

Almost 1,100 questions were written for the World Quizzing Championships 2008!

The next stage in the process is for the questions to go to a wider panel of judges from most of the countries taking part. The panel award points to questions depending on how much they like them and they can veto any that they deem unsuitable for someone in their country/region to answer.

The highest scoring questions, covering the broadest range of subjects, are thus selected and used.

Once this process has been completed, the questions then go for translation into all languages that have been requested. Last year, one set has even been translated and then produced in Braille.

The result is, we hope, a competition that's equally fair to all those taking part.