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| Team Letter to The Oz After the 1988 contest, Terry Wiegert and Rod Larson wrote a letter to Jim Oliva (The Oz) suggesting a change to the Trivia scoring system. As a result of this letter the pari-mutuel scoring system was adopted and it is still in use today. Before 1989, questions were assigned a point value prior to being read on the air. The point assignments were determined by the question writer’s best guess at the difficulty factor of the question. The pari-mutuel scoring system (CNOF’s name for the system) assumes that the true difficulty of the question will be determined by the number of teams with correct answers. The points assigned to each question are calculated based on the “market’s” ability to answer the question. |
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| Under the old scoring system, questions were assigned
values anywhere from 5 to 500 points. Much of the time, the assigned points were
appropriate for the difficulty of the question; However, many times a question would be
answered by a handful of teams and they would be rewarded a paltry 20 points or so for
their efforts. Under the pari-mutuel scoring system, if two teams answered that same difficult question, they would receive 400 points. On the other hand, if “everybody” got the question correct the point value would be 5 or 10.¹ CNOF's letter suggested a need for change and The Oz agreed.
¹2000 points divided by the total of 3 plus the number of correct teams rounded up to the nearest number ending in 0 or 5. A maximum value of 500 points is possible for any question regardless of correct answers. |
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Send comments to terrywiegert@gmail.com |
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Letter copyright © 1997-2010 Terry Wiegert. All Rights Reserved. |