Often
times a country's score will drop a lot over a short
period. There are no external forces trying to sabotage
you. Every time this has occurred has been for the
same reason. Either a chat room or media outlet in
your country has informed hundreds or thousands or
tens of thousands of your country men and women about
the contest, which brings many new participants. These
participants usually are novices and unfortunately
the end result is a large drop in score. Don't worry
too much though. Most of the time, these novices,
upset by their results, grow to become experts and
the score eventually comes around. This is especially
rewarding for us to see, because we know that everyone
is learning their geography.
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.
