Ensuring
the accuracy of the Geography Challenge
Thanks
to its global accessibility, the Internet is the perfect medium to
hold an international competition such as The Geography Challenge.
The only disadvantage is that we cannot monitor each person as they
take the quiz. Because of this, one individual could potentially warp
the results of entire scoreboard. We are well aware of this and we
have taken a number of steps to completely eliminate or, at the very
least, narrow the impact of this behavior.
To
begin with, we have limited the number of times one is able to take
the quiz to three attempts per day. We do encourage people to try
to improve their geography skills and come and help their country
as they do, but we do not want one individual to take the quiz continuously
while still at the same level of geographical competence.
Obviously
if one had an atlas or a globe by their side, they would be able to
get every question right with enough time on their hands. To eliminate
this, we allow only 200 seconds for each quiz session. Anyone trying
to cheat would not have nearly enough time to complete the challenge.
Finally
with these automatic checks in place, we still fear
the occasional hacker who figures out a way to bring
a country to dominance or depletion. So we monitor the
results manually on a regular basis and search for odd
quirks. If for instance, a country had 1000s of contestants
all in a short period of time and all scoring the same
or about the same score, we would notice the problem
and revert the scores back to their original placement.
If
you know of other ways that one might try to cheat the system, we
would love to hear about them. Please send us an email.
