Wednesday, January 15, 2020

7-question quizlet on religion

Bored during my lunch hour, I created this 7-question mini-quiz about religion. It's focused mainly on concepts and terminology, and it's meant to be much higher-level than religion quizzes that softball you with questions like "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor" is one of the (5/7/10/12) Commandments. Have fun with my quiz; take guesses. I've always wanted to design my own test of general knowledge about religion(s); this may be a tentative step in that direction, but for the moment, it's just a way for me to entertain myself.

NB: the quiz has been acting wonkily. I tested it out several times yesterday, scoring 7/7 every time (well, I did write the thing), then deliberately messing up to see how the quiz would behave when I gave it wrong answers. Everything seemed fine... but then today, I scored 7/7 with the answers, but the quiz was telling me I was scoring only 6/7. I thought I was hallucinating this at first, or that I had genuinely made certain mistakes, but no: when I went through the quiz again very slowly, ticking all the correct boxes, I got another 6/7. The problem seems to be the question about the Eightfold Path: you can correctly click all eight elements of the path, and the program will still mark you wrong for some reason. So that happened once or twice as I was working my way cautiously through the quiz, then something even weirder happened: when I clicked all the right answers to the Eightfold Path question, the program marked me wrong (you can see your right and wrong answers at the bottom of the screen)... but gave me a final score of 7/7. Go figure.

So something's obviously not stable. Maybe the free version of this quiz-maker is just buggy, and you have to pay the subscription fee to obtain a higher-quality version of the program. I'm mulling over whether I want to pay such a fee. It's kind of expensive. Maybe I should take certain unsympathetic Democrats' advice and learn to code. Isn't that what the Dems told the coal miners they'd need to do once their jobs had been eliminated by Hillary? Learn to code? Well, in my case, learning to code might not be a bad idea: I'd be able to create quizzes and all sorts of other puzzles without having to pay a subscription fee.



6 comments:

The Maximum Leader said...

I feel stupid. 0 of 7.

Kevin Kim said...

And now I feel guilty for making you feel stupid.

John Mac said...

I got one answer right. I feel better than Maximum Leader! :)

Kevin Kim said...

Mike,

By way of reassurance, I should note that terms like perichoresis aren't heard much outside of religious academe. However, it's possible you could have figured it out by looking at the Greek: peri means "(a)round," and choresis comes from khoreia ("dance"), the root that gives us "choreography." So perichoresis means "the dance in the round," and is a clumsy way of referring to the mystical relationship of the Three Persons of the Trinity, for which no visual analogy is apt.

The Maximum Leader said...

No reason to feel guilty. I got some of the multiple selections correct, but if you didn't get all the elements correct you missed the whole question. So I get that. If I had spent more time reading and thinking about it (rather than doing the quiz while I was waiting for my lunch to cook) I *may* have done better. I'm not going to lean on that too much. I may not have scored any differently. I'll be frank and say that your explanation of perichoresis is clear and now that you point it out I feel like I did once know those roots, but I wonder if I would have been able to recall them. (Even if given time to do so.)

It is no matter. I am not a scholar of religion and don't feel badly about not knowing "shop vocabulary" for religious academe. It would have been nice to get one or two right for boasting purposes only. Had I done so I could brag about the breadth of my esoteric knowledge in hopes lesser mortals would bow before my superior intelligence. Alas, I'm just a regular schmuck.

Kevin Kim said...

Well, to assuage my guilt, you could fashion an advanced-level history quiz for me to earn my own 0/7!