I took the MSNBC/Newsweek fifteen-question quiz on my “good basic knowledge of world religions” (not a precise description of the quiz, but I went ahead and took it anyway). When I got the first answer right, it told me that I had attained a score of 200% — pretty good, eh, considering I had only just started? Then I got the second answer right, and it said my score had dropped to 150%. Now, apart from the mathematical absurdity of my having a score over 100% after only two questions — and I agree that that’s a big “apart from” — my score actually declined when I got a second answer right.
For the rest of the quiz, my reported score again varied in ways that don’t correspond to a percentage-of-fifteen. So I think this whole set-up is an elaborate scam, designed to trap readers into boasting about hyperbolic scores that reveal that they don’t know anything about math. Either that or the quiz programmer. . . no, it must be a trap.