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# Brilliant difficulty

I feel as if this week's brilliant is significantly difficult than last week's (or at leas last week's level 3 algebra), and level 4 geometry feels like last weeks level 5 geometry(yeah, i dropped a level. no shame because level 5 was way too difficult). Is there a reason for this?

Note by Anthony J.
4 years ago

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The challenge masters do keep an active eye on the percentages (broken down by student levels) that students answer problems and solve them correctly. The stats for last week were not significantly different from previous weeks, and there were no unanticipated exceptions.

When we create problems, we sort them into the appropriate difficulty, before selecting which problems to be used in a week. Of course, there could be a slight bias from week to week. Once in a while, we might do a mid-week adjustment, especially if the statistics are heavily skewed either way.

There are specific questions which we know would tend to have a lower (or higher) solve rate than others at their level, due to the technicalities of the question. For example, in setting Calvin VS Black Dragon (40 points), I knew that a lot of students will simply jump at the work "minimum" and conclude that the number of hits must be $$\lceil \frac{50000} { 145} \rceil$$. In this case, approximately 35% of level 2 students got answered correctly, compared to a usual average of 60% (for a 40 point question). Staff · 4 years ago