The long overdue review of the Mahaquizzer of this year is finally being posted. Mahaquizzer is an individual written quiz held simultaneously all over India since 2005. The quiz has 150 questions to be answered in 90 minutes.
The pattern of the questions was much different from last year. There was an emphasis on language and word origins in most of the questions. Many people thought that they were solving a cryptic crossword instead of a quiz. Others who are strong in areas like word origins, language and literature loved the quiz. A written quiz should be made even where all quizzers would have an equal chance. There were certain questions which were a little misleading in their clues like Irish cricket team has nothing to do with a four leaved clover as mentioned in question 56. The Irish symbol is the Shamrock. Again in question number 18 Venus is not the progeny of Juve and Diana in Roman myth. The other facts about Venus were correct however the first bit of information was misleading.
KQA must keep in mind that all types of quizzers take this quiz and they should not make it one dimensional. We need to work more on the international style like the WQC. If we need to improve the overall scores internationally instead of just two people scoring highly from India the pattern of the paper has to be modified accordingly.
Overall the paper was a good test of certain areas of knowledge. Some questions could be worked out easily.
Many thanks are due to Gautam Ghosh for arranging the venue and Rudradeep for the legwork.
The Top Five Scores from Calcutta:
1) Shouvik Guha - 78
2) Jayashree Mohanka - 76 (The best score by a lady in India)
3) Gautam Ghosh - 63
4) Sanjoy Mukherjee - 61
5) Anirudh Chari - 60
2 comments:
Good to see Shauvik and Jayashree topping from Cal. They are deserving winners. Can someone post the questions (and the answers too :))please?
I tend to punch above my weight in this quiz so obviously, it is my favourite in this genre.
What I like about it is the fact that most questions can be worked out from a careful reading of the wordings. As against a WQC kind of format which is more about brute memory-retrieval: either you know it or you don't.
And I'm not into crosswords and find the clues workable- the cryptic clue comment isn't fair.
The Irish cricket team popularising four-leaf clovers was also a perfectly fair question.
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