National Science and Math Quiz: A suggestion

Dear Primetime Limited,

I commend you for organizing the national science and maths quiz every year. Apart from the fun of bringing schools to compete with each other, it provides an avenue for income redistribution from corporate organizations to families who would never get such income transfers without your platform.

I want to suggest a few ways to improve the quality of the quiz if taken into consideration.

Scoring of open-ended questions: While the current format for awarding points to open-ended questions is widely used in many contests globally, I think it is time to improve on it. Even in football, there are four referees on the pitch and two VAR officials (recently introduced to correct some of the mistakes by the central referee).

I suggest there should be at least 3 referees responsible for scoring the open-ended questions where scores are subjective and highly dependent on the central referee making the decision and subject to unconscious bias. I believe some of the biases can easily be mitigated when referees independently submit their points for open-ended questions.

Question selection: The way questions are arranged can easily put schools into disadvantaged positions. I can imagine an arrangement where all difficult questions are put in a certain position like 1, 4, 7... In that case, a school can be predetermined to lose the competition. To mitigate this concern, schools should be allowed to randomly draw from a pool of questions what they prefer to answer without any replacement.

For example, if a school chooses Q3, then the question be revealed and read aloud for them to answer. This will give every school an equal opportunity to select questions and mitigate biases from officiating officials.

Mode of conducting the quiz: Since the competition has several sponsors, it is possible to transition some of the activities into digital forms. Laptops and large screens/monitors should be used to computerize the quiz. Since the competition is promoting science, math, and technology, it will be great to also demonstrate the power of technology as an example.

Please, it is time to move the questions and reading of questions and responses into a digital mode when the computer or virtual assistant will read the questions through the microphones for everyone to hear and also respond yes/no as directed by the officiating official.

Also, there should be monitors all over to visually display the questions for both the audience and the contestants. While it is possible that human intonation and tone can easily exhibit one's preference and dislike for a school, using a virtual assistant can easily mitigate this issue.

Speed race, open-ended questions, and riddles: Another advantage of digitalizing the competition is that since some schools easily can depend on the incorrect answers by another school to guess correctly, it will be great to digitalize the mode of delivering answers so schools don't observe incorrect answers by other schools to guess their answers.

If schools are asked to answer the questions digitally and the first correct answer is picked and awarded points to the school, it will provide an avenue for all schools to make independent decisions without observing what other schools say before providing their answers. If two or more schools answer the question correctly at the same time, both schools should be given the points. Once a school has answered the question incorrectly, the remaining school will not be advantaged to observe what the other school said before making a final determination.

I hope these few points will be taken into serious consideration for all schools to have an equal chance of winning the competition. Once again, thank you for organizing this great competition.