- #1
enkrypt0r
- 10
- 0
Forgive my ignorance; I'm a programmer and relatively math-minded, but I haven't taken statistics since high school.
From what I understand, there are many different ways to do this for things such as standardized tests, given to thousands of students. I'm wondering if it would be feasible to have a sort of algorithm which, given information about which questions each team got right and wrong, would send up a red flag if something didn't jive.
For the sake of example, "cheating" here just constitutes using a cell phone or some other method of getting the answer. Don't worry about teams collaborating, copying off of or listening in on one another, or anything like that. We'll assume that the questions expect free-form answers, i.e. no multiple choice. Either they wrote "Waterloo" or they didn't. It's binary.
The big hurdle here (for the place I play trivia, at least) would be statistical certainty. There are generally only 6-10 teams, and each team generally has roughly five people. There are 50-60 questions in a given night. This seems like so few points to draw data from, but (as a programmer) I'm used to much larger datasets and I don't really remember how correlation coefficients work. Would it be possible to draw any meaningful conclusions (or at least hints) given such a small data set?
I would think that if a team is consistently the only one to get an answer correct, that would be a big indicator. It would, however, also suggest that the team is just better at trivia. Is there a way to sort out when their knowledge is unlikely to be unassisted?
Would this be at all doable given the parameters I've outlined, or is there just no way to tell given *only* information about which teams answers which questions correctly and incorrectly? I realize that a better way to catch cheaters is probably instinct and observation.
I realize I'm relatively ignorant in this area, so please feel free to correct my thoughts and assumptions.
Thanks!
From what I understand, there are many different ways to do this for things such as standardized tests, given to thousands of students. I'm wondering if it would be feasible to have a sort of algorithm which, given information about which questions each team got right and wrong, would send up a red flag if something didn't jive.
For the sake of example, "cheating" here just constitutes using a cell phone or some other method of getting the answer. Don't worry about teams collaborating, copying off of or listening in on one another, or anything like that. We'll assume that the questions expect free-form answers, i.e. no multiple choice. Either they wrote "Waterloo" or they didn't. It's binary.
The big hurdle here (for the place I play trivia, at least) would be statistical certainty. There are generally only 6-10 teams, and each team generally has roughly five people. There are 50-60 questions in a given night. This seems like so few points to draw data from, but (as a programmer) I'm used to much larger datasets and I don't really remember how correlation coefficients work. Would it be possible to draw any meaningful conclusions (or at least hints) given such a small data set?
I would think that if a team is consistently the only one to get an answer correct, that would be a big indicator. It would, however, also suggest that the team is just better at trivia. Is there a way to sort out when their knowledge is unlikely to be unassisted?
Would this be at all doable given the parameters I've outlined, or is there just no way to tell given *only* information about which teams answers which questions correctly and incorrectly? I realize that a better way to catch cheaters is probably instinct and observation.
I realize I'm relatively ignorant in this area, so please feel free to correct my thoughts and assumptions.
Thanks!