How to conduct your own quiz

While hosting your own quiz, you need to seriously think about the following points, so as to optimize the fun the contestants, the audience and even you as the QuizMaster will have.

Tabulate your resources
- How much funding do you have? Remember that even printing question papers will cost money
Decide how many rounds you'd want to have
- It is usually custom to have a preliminary round to eliminate 90% of the contestants so that you can have an interactive “stage” session with the top 6-8 teams in the final
- Rounds typically are themed, with one question per team per round
- It is possible to keep multiple 'Audience Rounds' wherein people from the audience are invited to answer questions, keep some chocolates or sweets as tasty rewards!
Once you have an idea of how many rounds you want to have and what your resources are, it becomes significantly easier to organize and prepare for, the quiz.
For the preliminary round, it is usually easier to print seperate sheets for each team, however if you are low on funds its possible to just project the questions onto a screen or simply read them out.
For the finals, there are multiple factors you should take into consideration
- Seating
  - Seating can be crucial in a quiz. Sitting next to a very strong team will result in lesser passed questions coming towards you. Sitting next to a weaker team will also disrupt the fairness of the results. Since it is virtually impossible to judge how strong or weak a team is merely by talking to them, it is usually fair to draw lots for seating.
- Marking Systems
  - Direct/Pass₁ basically The team that gets the question, if unable to answer passes it along to the next team(Either clockwise or counterclockwise, depending on the direction in which the round is travelling) who can answer it for what is usually half or a quarter of the original points intended for that question. While this method is traditional, it tends to be slightly unfair as strong yet unlucky teams may answer more questions correctly, while still loosing because a weaker team will answer more direct questions, due to the static order of questions.
  - Infinite Bounce₂ In this system, questions, when passed to other teams retain the same amount of points and the next question is addressed to the team succeeding the team that answered the last question. In this way questions 'bounce' around all teams, ensuring that no team can easily get double the marks anyone else can in any one round. Infinite Bounce is inherently fairer than other quiz formats and is the currently followed trend in most high-quality quizzes. It may also be called infinite bounds/rebounds.
  - Variations of these two basic techniques exist, sometimes the Direct and Pass will have equal points for passed questions or Infinite Bounce will address the question to the team preceding the team that answered the last question, thereby giving that team the last crack at the question. Feel free to choose anything that suits you.
  - Bonus Rounds Often one can push in custom rounds such as “Rapid Fire” or “Single Shot” rounds, just to bring an element of change into the quiz.
  - A Note for when using buzzers, there can often be some confusion, as multiple contestants are apt to press the buzzer only seconds apart, making it impossible to tell who hit the button first. There are two solutions-
    - Film the proceedings using a high speed camera
    - Create a simple circuit that prevents multiple buzzers from registering at once.
- The Questions
  - As they say “The Cream of the Crop”. In any quiz, THE most important thing are the questions. It is exceedingly important to introduce balanced questions in a quiz. It wouldn't exactly be fair to ask a team what the capital of Burkina Faso was (Ouagadougou) and then turn to the next team and ask what the capital of the United States of America was now would it? Balanced, sometimes funny questions bring an element of life into a quiz. It is also possible to introduce sometimes strange or not-so-obvious questions into a quiz. For example, there is a shrine in Tokyo called the Kanda-Myojin Shrine where people actually go to get their laptops blessed. A question asking the name of the shrine would be largely appreciated as something humorous.
  Kanda-Myojin Shrine
- Time
  - As with everything, Time can often be a deciding factor in a quiz. If the quiz lasts several hours, you would prefer to supply the audience with some refreshments from time to time. Plus venues are often booked by the hour. So be very careful of the time and how much time you can afford to spend in a single round.

1. http://notesandstones.blogspot.com/2004/02/formats-of-rounds-ii-in-continuation.html
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_bounce