Babylon 5 Geek Test at Bureau 42

The development of Bureau 42’s Geek Test continues. This time around, site founder Dave created 20 questions to challenge and norm our readers. You can take the test at http://bit.ly/rE14oC. Please do the test once only, and give it your best effort. Come back next week for a similar test for Star Trek: The Original Series. Feel free to share the link! We’ll need a lot more respondents this time around; Part A had 32 possible response patterns, while this part has 1048576, and we need to see the way those patterns appear when people are trying their hardest.

17 replies on “Babylon 5 Geek Test at Bureau 42”

  1. It’d be nice to know how many we get right after we submit.

    I had to guess at one or two as it’s been over a decade since I’ve seen it, but most of it came back to me.

  2. Love this quiz! I loved Babylon 5. I concur on wanting to know the results.

    Also, the question on who Sheridan married has two possible correct answers.

      • Actually, Sheridan was married three times and two of his spouses are on the list, his first (brief) marriage was to Lochley, the second was to Anna (who is missing from the list), and third to Delenn (no cheating, now!). I took the question to mean which marriage ceremony did we get to see on screen, so no harm no foul. :)

          • You’d be surprised at how many do when you actually analyze what options people pick on most tests. That’s why I check the discrimination on the questions. With a 20 question set, the way things are developing, I’m going to need about 200 responses to this and a new set of harder questions to do the math on the difficulty levels. The “Star Trek: TOS” questions are written and with the prescreening crowd, but preliminary results say there is a more diverse set of difficulties. (Of the first 7 respondents, only two got 100%. One was me, which is a bit unfair since I made the questions, and the other was a friend I know who speaks Klingon.)

  3. Entered my email address and boom, it decided I had taken the test. Wish the email entry was at the bottom of the quiz. So I went back to the test, but had no idea how I did. Is there some way to view the results?

    • The final version will have a different interface than Google forms. When I have enough responses to build a valid statistical model, I’ll start sending out both percentage and scaled ability scores.

      The final version will look significantly different. Nobody will see every question on the test, and people with two different levels of ability will see different questions. Questions will appear one at a time, and performance will determine the question you see next. To produce scores for everybody, the database needs questions so easy everyone can get them, as well as questions so hard everybody gets something wrong.

  4. Which of these characters has NOT been the commander of Babylon 5?
    It seems Ivanova is the honeypot here, but didn’t she serve as acting commander at least once?

  5. Waaay back in 1999, in the official B5 chat, a trivia contest was held each friday, with prizes and all. After participating and winning three times in a row, the mods chose me to be the one to ask questions next time.

    Ah, memories… :-)

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