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Kerry Pogue

February 13, 2025 • 6 minutes

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Elusive 10 Series

What’s so special about scoring a 10/10 in Quizified? Like most things in life worth celebrating, the answer lies in its rarity.

Since its launch as recently as August 2024, Quizified has already been played over 25,000 times. Its appeal would apparently lie in its simplicity: there’s just one quiz to play each day, and each quiz consists of just ten questions. You’d be forgiven, then, for thinking that you’d a good chance of occasionally achieving full marks.

And yet just 21% of Quizified players have achieved the feat. Even more surprising, less than 2% of those 25,000 completed quizzes have been completed without error. For some context, the average Quizified score sits some way off at 6/10, with scores of 2, 3 and 4/10 each more common than a clean sweep.

So why is it so difficult to get a 10? Are the questions just impossibly difficult? The data would suggest not – at least not individually – according to a recent analysis we conducted.

Rather, with its ten fixed categories, Quizified relentlessly tests a broad spectrum of knowledge – you’re just as likely to be faced with a question on Australian soaps as one on 17^th century works of art. And acquiring that breadth of knowledge over a lifetime is simply impossible for most of us. The reality is, we all have a few sizable gaps in our general knowledge. And that’s understandable. We find some topics more interesting than others. We specialise. And after all, there are only so many hours in the day to swot up.

I have a major blind spot, for example, in the arts & literature category, where more often than not, I take a complete guess and hope for the best. And unlike other quizzes, where I can hope that an arts question just won’t come up, or a more cultured teammate can cover for me if it does, Quizified brutally exposes my weakness, without fail, on a daily basis.

I quickly came to the conclusion that I’d need to close this gap in my knowledge to have any hope of consistently achieving a perfect score. The trouble was, the gap was vast! I couldn’t tell a Shakespearean play from a Dickens novel, never mind recite the works of Rembrandt, Picasso or Van Gogh. Surely I couldn’t learn it all?

But what if I didn’t have to?

I was reminded of the tale of Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian polymath I’d read about years ago. Supposedly, Pareto was busy harvesting peas in his garden sometime around 1896, when he noticed that some pea pods contained more peas than others. Curious, and perhaps with more time on his hands than we’re used to today, he counted his harvest to discover that approximately 80% of all his peas came from around just 20% of the pods. An economist by trade, he soon observed that the same rule of thumb could be applied to the distribution of wealth in Italy – just 20% of the population owned 80% of the land. After conducting surveys on several other countries, he was amazed to find that similar distributions applied elsewhere.

Pareto published his findings in the book Cours d'économie politique but it wasn’t until the mid-20^th century that the “Pareto Principle” was popularised by management consultant Joseph Juran. Juran argued that many processes in business followed an "important few and trivial many" pattern. The exact proportions didn’t matter. Pareto had discovered a power-law – a statistical relationship where a small number of contributors account for the majority of effects.

“What does any of this have to do with quizzing?” I hear you groan. Well, what if just 20% of all general knowledge could account for 80% of your quiz performance? What if there were things you could focus on in each category that would have an outsized effect on your chances of achieving a high score?

Why would this be the case? Firstly, quizmasters tend to take their inspiration for questions from similar sources of interesting trivia, which are rich in content, widely relatable, and allow for creativity in question design. It’s just not in their interest to ask overly obscure questions that demand highly specialised knowledge. Correctly answering questions releases the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain’s reward circuitry, which feels pleasurable and motivates the repeat participation a quizmaster desires. It’s a fine balancing act though. The effect is most keenly felt when the reward is well-earned. Make the quiz too easy and engagement plummets.

Secondly, many quizzes adopt a multiple choice format, which is helpful for two reasons: 1) it means we’re able to use any knowledge we do possess to eliminate incorrect answers, increasing the probability we’ll guess a correct answer from the remaining options and, 2) we’re required only to recognise the correct answer from a series of cues rather than to actively recall it – a significantly less cognitively demanding task which leverages a different neurological process in the brain’s memory centres.

We should also keep in mind that while the number of possible quiz questions is of course infinite, the number of broad categories from which a question is drawn isn’t. This should encourage us. By adopting a targeted approach to learning the most useful information within each category, we can develop a broad foundation of high-yield knowledge.

It's precisely this realisation which has inspired this blog series.

Over the course of the next several months, we’ll show you what you should learn in each category for the greatest return on your investment of time and how you can remember the content to give your quiz performance the boost it needs. We’ll show you high frequency answers to guess when in doubt, and highlight useful trivia you can use to improve your process of elimination.

You’ll discover:

• Why just a handful of monarchs hold the keys to a dramatic improvement in your knowledge of British history.
• How the use of a simple mnemonic will ensure you never forget the countries of Central America.
• How learning the major works of just five artists will save you from drawing blanks when faced with a question on the arts.
• The number one guess you should make when faced with a question on French history.
• And much, much more!

And that’s not all. By following this series, you’ll learn meta-skills developed from the most important findings in memory science to improve your retention, recognition and recall of new content. You’ll be consistently scoring 10s in no time!