Which sort of quiz do you enjoy most - or least?

Question

This may sound off-topic, but since it might help improve SoloLearn's content long-term, I hope it passes. :-)

Whenever I review a few quizzes I find many that I would never like to encounter, e. g. because they are too basic or too specialized. Also when I play challenges, I have my personal taste of quizzes.

And that must be true for other sololearners: Sometimes a riddle I enjoyed making gets declined because of 'community downvotes'.

And don't make a mistake: I test my riddles before I submit; I have read the well-known former threads about what sort of riddle is supposed to 'pass more likely' and I try to stick to them.

But the taste of SoloLearn's jury may differ from the taste of the community. By clarifying what riddles rock most, we get hints about what riddles to create, and it might also be helpful to know for the jury as well.

I'd like you to discuss with me: What sort of challenge riddles are most valuable? And what kind do you think is useless? What do you enjoy? What do you dislike?

Answer 1

(1/2) A lot of people complain that quizzes do not do enough to help someone understand a language better. Unfortunately, as thought provoking as some questions are, they inevitably become a one-off thing. 2-3 encounters later, the answer comes from muscle memory instead of a brain workout. There's no way around this. That said, it's not necessarily a bad thing. Beginners struggle at providing answers which are instantly identifiable by seasoned programmers, such as the number of iterations of a loop given the halt condition, calculations which involve operator precedence, boolean logic, etc. Since quizzes eventually turn into a memory game, it might be a good idea to take advantage of this to get learners to memorize some useful examples which would help them during their daily coding sessions. It's like planting a cheat sheet in their heads. This sounds really generic, and I'm having some issues coming up with a specific example. I still hope I conveyed my point.

Answer 2

I like quizzes that are related to real life coding problems and dislike everything else. I feel like a lot of questions promote bad coding style by using overly complicated syntax that no programmer would ever use in real life. You usually don't use four nested loops to generate a simple string etc. And if you need to calculate and memorize the values of four variables called a, b, c and d to understand the output of your code, it's probably time to use better variable names or at least some comments to make your code readable. That is what should be taught imo.

Also there's a huge gap between what the tutorials teach and what is expected in some quizzes (as already was pointed out). So if you can't answer some overly complicated quiz questions after finishing a tutorial it might make you feel like you learned nothing in the tutorial, or it might give you a wrong idea about what coding looks like, which might be discouraging.

Answer 3

A lot of quizzes feel like asking kids to solve a Sudoku immediately after you taught them to count to ten. Maybe some of them will like it. Maybe it will make some of them hate math.

Answer 4

I like the "Fill in the blank" questions since they help us practice. I like also questions that test our understanding and our intelligence.
But i definitely dislike questions that are too complicated for the very short time available. It makes me feel like the only persons answering them are the ones who already memorised the answer in previous challenges.

Answer 5

(2/2) Speaking of enjoyment, one of the largest killjoys I've met would be quizzes which learners weren't taught to answer in the tutorials provided in SL. It can be really frustrating to encounter something which is entirely out of syllabus. However, we can still rationalize with the existence of these quizzes, since completely rejecting them would result in an oversaturation of quizzes focusing on a narrow range of topics. I'm still unsure if quizzes are assigned to different levels, to avoid beginners from encountering problems which are way out of their league. From past observations, quite a number of beginners, especially those who haven't fully completed a particular course, have complained about being hit with quizzes featuring topics yet to be unlocked. Of course, this doesn't pertain to the creators/creation of quizzes, but rather the system itself.

Answer 6

//Quizzes which I like in challenge:
● Code Quizzes (not much theoritical stuff)
● Quizzes involving some new functions, which I can use in my codes or I can learn something from it.
● Quizzes involving small riddles
● Quizzes which checks some basic concepts(like in java, use of static keyword)
● not much of calculation should be there, but some nice way of solving them, then no problem.

//Quizzes which I upvote:
● quizzes having unavailable topics
● even if repeated concept then also if different from other quizzes then I like.
● quizzes involving helpful topics(like regex, streams in java)

//Quizzes which I downvote or skip:
● repeated quizzes & nothing new in it.
● large quizzes which need to much of time to read & are not helpful.
● too much calculation & no useful thing which we can apply in coding Assignments.
● theoritical ones I skip generally.
● badly arranged
● spam

Answer 7

Well I'd prefer quizzes that are easy to understand, not like those complex codes that seem to be written in an entirely new language.

I also (as a challenge stormer) prefer questions that are easy to memorize. [Not ashamed to reveal this]

I also prefer questions of a particular weapon varied over a spectrum of things. Like I don't want 101 quizzes on the append() method of a list in Python, I want one quiz to be on Regex, one on pip, etc.

Answer 8

My personal favourite riddles are those who look conventional, but if you look at the result, you think: 'Wait, what?'

In my case that happens a lot with identities: Python lists (and other mutables) and their trapfalls, surprises of inheritance, reference count magic, stuff like that, where superficial knowledge of the language will lead you to the *wrong* answer.

What I don't like: Questions that you can just google, like 'is indentation important in Python' or stuff like that. There should always be some thinking/processing of code going on.

Also if the riddles are just about doing math in our head, or if they just explain again how you print something, I believe they really should remain in the beginner tutorial.

Answer 9

Both:
I don't know what I like. But I sure know what I don't like! I dislike questions with terrible variable names. It makes more sense to me if you have a dog/cat example rather than a/b. I think it's annoying doing lesson quizzes when the question is the exact verbage of the example that was just shown me. At least change the variable names!

Lesson quizzes:
Also in the lessons, it feels like some topics lack enough questions, especially the hard ones. The harder it is, the more questions it should have so you learn more.

Challenges:
As a more personal preference I dislike questions that are purposely misleading like when a Boolean named true is false, etc. On the other hand, ones that are too straightforward are annoying in their own right.

An idea to improve I had was adaptive time for each question. The more wrong answers/out of times a question gets, the longer time it has. The time seems to short for long questions sometimes, but to lengthy for short ones esp. multiple choice.

Answer 10

Hatsy Rei, 'people will end up memorizing the riddles... so let them memorize something useful.'

Wise! You basically redirect the power of a flaw in a way that we can achieve a learning advantage! :-) That's a good thing to consider while creating quizzes, thanks!

About the difficulty: I would love if the algorithm automatically paired people who share the same set of unmastered questions, and ask them these instead of force-feeding the same old riddles over and over. (I'm okay with it after I've met every riddle.)

Personally I only started with challenges after I had finished 3/4 of the Tutorial; in the beginning was hard, but relatively quickly I settled around 3/5 correct answers. I felt the level was okay if you treated challenges as 'level 2 - application' of the tutorial.

But yeah, it would certainly help to sort them by difficulty and feed users fitting riddles.

Answer 11

I like quizes that are lesser based on complex mathematical calculation.

Answer 12

(Don't worry, I won't keep sitting on 'best answer'. ;-))

Many have written they dislike to encounter topics that weren't touched in the tutorials.

But what do you all think about quizzes containing stuff that was not literally taught, but clearly sets up on what was taught?

For example: I don't remember if or if not; let's just say Python's dict method 'get' was not taught in the tutorial, but dictionaries in general were taught. Would you be okay to get confronted with get?

Imo it would be a valuable add-on to my general knowledge, and I would be totally okay with losing a challenge once, but having learned something useful.

But what do you say?

Answer 13

I like the quizzes which do not involve a lot of calculations. This is because you have limited time while playing challenges

Answer 14

Maneren, totally, the input field shouldn't give the solution away by its length!

Actually lately I got one of my submitted quizzes approved where I took care that this doesn't happen; when I looked at the riddle though - it had been changed in a way that it suddenly gave the solution away!

Feels like they don't get around to reviewing a lot of what we are offering; and when they finally do, they're probably in a hurry...

I think it would be better to get more helpers from the community; I'm sure there are many experienced coders who would do the reviewing - of lessons as well.

Answer 15

HonFu Re: Quizzes featuring untaught stuff.

I would consider the example you provided, fine. The get() method returning a value given a key seems rather self-explanatory, and, in practice, is almost unavoidable for most of whom are familiar with dictionaries, to have utilized .get() in the past.

When I brought up this issue, I had another specific example in mind, with that being C++ quizzes featuring nested namespace declarations and operations which pertain to manipulating members of said namespaces. I fail to recall anywhere in the C++ course where learners were taught to even declare their own namespaces:

namespace ns {
// ns members here
}

let alone access the internal members of nested namespaces.

Although I admit I ended up benefiting from these quizzes after I looked them up on the net, it was definitely a wtf moment for me (and many others, I believe) when they rolled out fresh from the factory.

Answer 16

I do not like those very long quizzes where I need to much time, reading them, so I have no time for thinking.

Answer 17

HonFu in a way I agree with your perspective that you can learn from those questions which tackle knowledge outside of the lessons. But it's not maybe what people expect when they think of a 'quiz'. For me, when I see that word, especially in an app that has lessons as its main feature, my expectation is that it will be quizzing knowledge I gained through those lessons. That's why people get startled. Maybe some UX trick would help here, to adjust expectation of what a quiz is (maybe "learner" and "advanced" categories) .

Now, if you wanna look at quizzes as a way of gaining new knowledge (as opposed to testing existing knowledge), then you'd need a different type of questions, that allow time to think it through. Then it would be a useful /sustainable way of learning. If I see something unfamiliar and just have to guess the answer within a few seconds, and then not have the right answer explained, I don't find that the most effective learning method.

Answer 18

Yes the "wait, what?" - type 😂

Answer 19

I mostly enjoy quizzes about complex for loops (what the community hates a lot).
Well there aren't any complexity in them, just we need to find the hidden key in it. If I described further there is a shortcut for solving each complex-for loop. And those questions with that kind of content really helped me to understand how to find the secret inside the most hated complex for loop. And then I like something with regex, logics, recursion and something we need our brain to solve.

And my most hated questions in sololearn are the one those we need to memorize and content with mostly subject matter. For example 'Is div a block element?' is one of the most hated one.

Answer 20

I like spotting and fixing bugs at least it's the sort of issue faced in real life...