How to Create a Great Quiz, Pt. 2

Questions: The Good, the Bad, and the Fugly

In Part 1 of this article, I covered how to choose the right questions and pick the right platform for your quiz. As a summary:

To choose questions, you must first decide: Are you sorting people into categories you’ve already decided, for fun and profit or to test a model? Or, are you trying to figure out what categories people are sort-able into, in order to create a model and thereby set up for fun (and probably about the same amount of profit BUT with the self-satisfaction of knowing you Did Science™️)?

Ideally, start with the latter, and then sort/test it. Here’s how to do it.

1. Break your topic down into a bunch of actions or possibilities. This may require research.

2. Make questions that point at each action or possibility. Each question can cover your full set of possible styles in a multiple-choice way, or (more commonly) a subset in multiple-choice or Likert scale.

Here’s a comparison of 3 quiz platforms: GuidedTrack, Typeform, and PointerPro.

Read the full article here, it’s free! This one will be paywall’d in a few paragraphs, but it’s even more fun (IMO), so

In this article, we’re going to talk about types of questions.

As I see it, questions fall into 3 categories….

The Good, the Bad, and the Fugly

P.S. When not taken from real quizzes (noted in the text), some of the examples in this article were generated by GPT4.

Let’s start with:

The Bad

I recently took a DISC assessment for a manager training I audited to consult on experience design. Gaze at the following questions, and tell me what is wrong with them.

1. “I avoid making mistakes in my work”

2. “I enjoy making my co-workers smile”

3. “I am humble”

Think about it, and then scroll below this picture of an actual quiz question in the wild.

Before I break these down, let me give you a little guide to how I assess whether a question is good or bad. I ask myself 2 things: