About Crack It

1. Intro

Crack It is the English Dept's biggest annual event at the Community College of Kharj. It was initiated by Rami Al-Sa'di and Dr Talha Sharadgah, and it is conducted on campus once a year as an outstanding extra-curricular activity.

2. The project

The project is mainly a contest, a kind of quiz show, with groups of students competing against each other. Apart from the general knowledge questions in this contest, all questions are apropos of the type of knowledge that interests students of English language, linguistics, literature, and the like.

2.1. General layout

            The project is a quiz contest to be organised by the department and held on campus. It is hoped that from this year on, this project will become the English Department’s biggest annual event. I gave the contest the name Crack It. In this contest, there are four groups or teams of two students each. The show host/ presenter (one of the faculty members or the chairman of the Department) asks each team a question, and the team is allowed up to 30 seconds to answer that question. Some questions are rather long, however, and so may be given more than 30 seconds. In this regard, the show presenter is given free hand to make decisions on the spur of the moment as he esteems fit. Any of the two students in the same team can answer the question. If a team gives out a wrong answer, they are not given a second chance, and the question is not passed on to the next team. Instead, the show host reads out the right answer and moves on to the next team to ask them a different question. This policy has to be adopted since the contest has some multiple-choice questions with only two options (e.g. Which of these fractions has a bigger value? A. -5/6, B. -6/5). Nevertheless, sometimes the question, if not answered correctly, may be diverted to the audience to pick their brains and so to get them more involved (see section 3).

To avoid any possible confusion that might be triggered by two contestants in the same team rushing in and giving two different answers at the same time, the show host informs the participants prior to the commencement of the show that it is a good idea for each team to choose their spokesman. Once all four teams have been asked one question each, the show host returns to team 1 and asks them a new question and so forth, until all the questions have been done.

            While the show is going on, there are at least three ‘registrars’ sitting in the background and recording marks. These three registrars have been given two scoring sheets each for the two stages of the contest (see 2.2 below for a detailed description of the makeup of Crack It). The number of registrars must be at least three in order to minimise the risk of human error in the recording of the marks. We do not want to end up giving the prize to the wrong contestant.

​

2.2 Makeup and modus operandi of Crack It

Although this quiz contest is very different from Anne Robinson’s quiz show, The Weakest Link, and is not an attempt to emulate it, I was largely inspired by The Weakest Link to come up with Crack It. Also, the Crack It candidates will be given the opportunity to watch several episodes of The Weakest Link prior to the Crack It show in order to give them a feel of what quiz contests are like. The participants in Crack It will be selected according to formal criteria set by the Department, mainly their performance in their mid-term examinations and their GPA.

Crack It is divided into two stages: the First Stage and the Knockout Stage. Each stage is subdivided into three rounds. These three rounds – the same in both stages – are: the General Knowledge Round, the English Language and Linguistics Round, and the Literature Round. In the First Stage, we have four teams competing against each other. Therefore, the number of the questions in each of the three rounds must be divisible by 4 so that all groups are asked the same number of questions. However, the number of questions is not necessarily the same in all three rounds. For instance, there can be 40 questions in the General Knowledge Round (40 is divisible by 4), 32 questions in the English Language and Linguistics Round (32 is divisible by 4), and 44 questions in the Literature Round (44 is divisible by 4). Once all questions have been asked, the First Stage comes to a close, and the marks are calculated by the three registrars. The three losing teams clear the decks, and the team with the highest number of correct answers qualifies for the Knockout Stage.

If there is a tie at the highest score between two or more teams, we play ‘Sudden Death’ until we have one winning team that will go through to the Knockout Stage. ‘Sudden Death’ is done by asking each team one question. If one team answers its question correctly and the other wrongly, the one with the right answer qualifies for the Knockout Stage. In the case of a three- or four-way tie, if team 1 for example answers its question correctly and the other teams answer theirs wrongly, team 1 wins. If more than one team answer their questions correctly, we still have a tie, and we play ‘Sudden Death’ again. If all teams answer their questions correctly or wrongly, we still have a tie and we play ‘Sudden Death’ all over again.

Note: If, for example, the scores at the end of the First Stage were as follows:

Team 1: 13 points

Team 2: 9 points

Team 3: 16 points

Team 4: 13 points

The team that goes through to the Knockout Stage in this case is team 3 (16 points), and we do not play ‘Sudden Death’ between teams 1 and 4 because they have both already been beaten (13 points).

            Now in the Knockout Stage the two students in the winning team will be playing against each other. Again, there are the same three rounds in this stage, and the final result is contingent on the sum of correct answers for each student in all three rounds. If there is a tie, the first technique of ‘Sudden Death’ as in the First Stage is applied until we have a winner. The student who ‘hits the jackpot’ will be awarded SAR... in addition to SAR... worth of books. The prize also includes an officially sealed congratulations letter conferred on the winner by the Department. The other student in the winning team won’t go home empty-handed: he will be given a bestselling classic and a thank-you letter.

            It is important to note that the candidates should be given the chance to prepare themselves for D-day (the day on which the contest takes place). I have prepared nearly a thousand questions – which I have called the Question Corpus – and made them available for the students both online (https://slmss2002.wixsite.com/crackit) and in hard copy. The one thousand questions or so tackle a myriad of topics in the three rounds of Crack It, and they simulate to a great extent the questions on the real contest. The Question Corpus should be made available for public access nearly three months before D-day, giving students ample time to search for the answers in their own time and to familiarise themselves with the type of questions on Crack It.

            One last portion of Crack It that needs to be stated is the PowerPoint slide show that accompanies the contest. All the questions and answers will be written into a PowerPoint project, each question and each answer in a separate slide. This PowerPoint project will be run by a computer that will be hooked up to a data show projector during the contest. Therefore, contestants as well as the audience will see each question and answer on a screen in addition to hearing them read out by the show host. While the host is running the show, someone will be running the PowerPoint project in unison with the Crack It show.

Because the time intervals for the different questions and answers are inescapably going to vary considerably depending on the length and level of difficulty of each question, the PowerPoint slide transition does not have a fixed automatic interval between each slide and the next. Instead, transition from each slide to the next is done manually by a mouse click only.

The PowerPoint slide show is indispensable to Crack It. That is because a good number of questions cannot be asked orally or only orally. The following example from the English Language and Linguistics Round explicates this.

Q: What is the silent letter in this word: doubt?

In this case, the presenter cannot utter the word because, if he does, he simply ‘gives the game away.’ So he can only spell it. This is just a simple example that can still be sorted out without recourse to the PowerPoint slide show. However, some questions are rather long and complex and must be written out for the students. Following is an example from the Literature Round:

Q: Match the name of each poet with the literary movement he is often associated with. Because the poets outnumber the movements, you can associate more than one poet with any one movement:

Caedman                            Anglo-Saxon Poetry

W. B. Yeats                          the Mediaeval Era

D. H. Lawrence                   Renaissance Poetry

William Wordsworth           Romanticism

Alfred, Lord Tennyson        Victorian Poetry

Edmund Spenser                Modern Poetry

William Langland                     

William Shakespeare

            As for the duration of the event, the whole show lasts for nearly two hours. Therefore, each round (there are six rounds in the two stages) will roughly be 16-18 minutes long. The amount of questions that have been prepared for each round is much more than enough for this time slot of 16-18 minutes. It follows then that it is incumbent upon the show host to be vigilant to the issue of timing and to bring each round to a close within 16-18 minutes. It is recommended that the show host keep a countdown device at his desk to aid him.

3. Rationale

            In order to make this project propitious for my goals – helping students improve their knowledge immensely in the various disciplines of their specialisation and encouraging them to work independently of the teacher in their endeavour to learn – the project has to encompass two wholesome facets.

            Firstly, the Question Corpus has to be bulky and informative. That end it does achieve. It contains a prodigious amount of carefully chosen, well presented, unambiguous questions of various levels of difficulty. Moreover, the questions were written in such a way as to make them lexically substantial. Most of the questions, including those on general knowledge, contain useful lexical items that are intentionally incorporated into the questions to maximise their linguistic usefulness. While the students are working on the Corpus, they are acquiring a colossal amount of vocabulary.

Secondly, the Question Corpus has to be made available to the students several months before the contest. Once the Question Corpus is ready, students will  immediately be given access to it to start their preparation for Crack It. In fact, the time span from the day the Question Corpus is made ready to D-day is the most important part of the Crack It project. For c. three months, the 8 candidates for Crack It as well as the substitutes, and even many other students in the Department, will delve in the Question Corpus rapaciously. They may avail themselves of every possible source of information in their search for the answers. When I ran this event before, I was ‘thrilled to bits’ to see the students discussing the questions and their progress between themselves and the various online search engines they had started exploring and the unique features of each of those search engines. Many of those students had never surfed the Net for educational purposes before and found it a rewarding experience to do so. They came to acknowledge the indispensability of the Internet as an auspicious learning source.

            While some students were working on the Question Corpus desultorily, most – especially the 8 candidates – worked really strenuously. In fact, every now and then some students, in their fervid desire and relentless determination to get the answers to all the questions, ended up cloistering themselves away for several days on end in their search. In brief, the students were now ardently searching and learning both individually and in small groups with minimal guidance and no direct supervision at all. They were unconsciously beginning to explore the merits of learner autonomy.

            Now the question that may arise is this: if the 8 candidates and the substitutes were spurred by the lure of the prize, what incentive got the rest of the students immersed in the project? For a start, it should be noted that the students’ most stimulating impetus should ideally be their keenness to improve their knowledge irrespective of any possible material reward, and Crack It came as a means to satiate this proclivity.

In addition, in a meeting with all the students in the Department shortly before the project was launched, I explained the forthcoming project to them in minute details, and I made it clear to them that when Crack It was held even the audience would every now and then be given the opportunity to participate. Some of the questions, especially those which the show host esteems to be particularly interesting to learners of English language/literature, will be diverted to the audience if the group (in the First Stage) or the contestant (in the Knockout Stage) fails to answer the question correctly. The show host decides on his own volition which unanswered or wrongly answered questions to divert to the audience and which to answer himself. The main factor affecting his decision is timing: the duration of the whole show, including the introduction (a welcoming speech by the chairman of the Department for instance and a word from the presenter), should by no means exceed two hours. The diversion of questions to the audience serves a good purpose: because the audience is largely made up of students, the theme of diverting questions to them in Crack It, which is an educational project, is to animate this event and to get the largest possible number of students actively involved in the project.

​

4. Scope and usefulness of the project

            A number of features of Crack It that are propitious for the purpose of helping students improve have been discussed in section 3, but the question remains of the worth of the contest questions themselves. The academic, educational value of the questions is what makes this project a success or otherwise. It has already been posited that the most important part of the project is the Question Corpus and the c. three-month hiatus that follows before D-day. The questions in the Corpus are to be envisioned as a guide to the type of questions that are really asked in the contest. The actual contest questions may be slightly different from the Corpus questions. However, the questions in the Corpus and the contest are more similar than different. Students were given to understand that anyone who has familiarised himself with the Corpus and can readily answer any of its questions with confidence will be home and dry for Crack It.

            I capitalised on this basic fact about the project by making the Question Corpus generative. The Corpus questions, in addition to having to be answered, encourage and even compel candidates and other students to study not only those specific questions but also related material extensively. For example, a question about conditional clauses gets the students to learn as much as possible about conditional clauses. In the same vein, a question about Thomas Hardy’s works is likely to incite some students to look for further information about Hardy's life and style of writing, and they might even end up reading whole articles on naturalism and determinism, as some of them hitherto really did.

            The Question Corpus is also generative in a different way. The students were made aware of the fact that some of the questions in the Question Corpus were going to be repeated verbatim in the contest and that some would appear in the contest but tossed in a different way from the Corpus. For instance, if a question in the Corpus says:

Q: What is the name of the (most) successful British singing group, which had four singers who started their singing career in Liverpool in 1963 and who were known in the media as the 'Fab Four'?

There might be a question in the contest that says:

Q: How many singers were in the (most) successful British singing group the Beatles?

Or:

Q: In which year did the Beatles, the famous British singing group, start their career in Liverpool?

Or:

Q: The Beatles were a very successful British singing group which had four singers who were known in the media as the ‘Fab Four’, and they started their singing career in 1963 in which English city?

Or:

The four singers in the (most) successful British singing group the Beatles were sometimes nicknamed the what Four in the media?

This tactic of question manipulation – which students were aware of – entailed the students’ need to study not only the answers to the Corpus questions but also the questions themselves.

            Apart from the generativeness of the Question Corpus, one more crucial point had to be treated with great care: accuracy and clarity of the questions. Accuracy works at all levels. At the linguistic level, all questions must be grammatically correct and properly punctuated, and diction must be immaculate. Accordingly, I had to check the language of each question over and over again, aided by an assortment of grammar and writing books in addition to my specialised knowledge of grammar and linguistics. At the register level, the appropriate jargon must be used concordantly with the topic in question. At the ‘facts’ level, each question as well as the information each question requires for an answer must be double- and triple-checked before the question is incorporated into the Corpus. Insofar as clarity is concerned, there must be no room for ambiguity and no room for more than one correct answer. For instance, the following question is ambiguous and thus is not eligible for the Question Corpus:

Q: What does the abbreviation RR stand for?

The same question can be disambiguated and thus made eligible for the Question Corpus by adding further information to the question and thus narrowing it down:

Q: In letter posting in the USA, RR is a written abbreviation used in addresses in some areas. What does RR stand for?

To thwart ambiguity, I consulted a whole host of sources: books, periodicals, articles, magazines, newspapers, dictionaries and thesauruses, electronic encyclopaedias (such as Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica), websites, and personal communication with individuals.

            Besides its goal as an educational ELT project, Crack It is also an extra-curricular activity, a social event, a divorce from the usual sordid humdrum of formal instruction. To augment the ‘social feel’ of this project, I prepared a light-hearted comedy to be played as a one-man show by one of the students before we got on with the contest. My expectation is that this comedy (paradoxically entitled The Ideal Studant) will establish a pleasant atmosphere of informality before the contest commences.