# Point System For Answering Categorized Questions

We are currently developing a gamified e-learning website.

The website will have a point system where the users can gain points by doing either asking or posting questions. Questions are grouped by categories. Every time they answer/post a question, they get points for it.

The problem is students can easily gain points by repeatedly posting questions and get a lot of points. In order to prevent this we decided to implement a point system where posting questions will garner less points than answering questions. The point system will also follow the law of supply and demand.

When the amount of unanswered questions for a category is greater than the median of the total questions, the amount of points you will gain from asking a question on that category decreases while the amount of points gained from answering increases vice versa.

Our initial plan was to set a range for points with 1 point being our minimum and 8 being the max. By following the rule above we labeled each category with "Lower points" being the categories less than the median, and "Higher points" for the categories higher than the median. "Higher points" will have points ranging from 5-8 while "Lower points" will have a range of 1-4.

The points shown here are for answering questions

The problem is if there is an outlier the points given is not justifiable

We believe that points from category 7 should garner smaller points because of the huge difference of questions from category 8.

We also want to limit the maximum points from answering to 8

Is there any other better point system if this does not seem fit?

• What is your criterion by which your would rate one way to be "better" than another? Harder to exploit? Easier to implement? Easier to understand? Something else? Also, what do you mean with "introducing" and "evaluating" questions? Is one of that a synonym for "answering"? Or are you talking about gamifying crowd sourcing? But then your question title doesn't match. It's really not clear what you are asking here. – Philipp Oct 20 '17 at 15:03
• Let me rephrase my post, sorry for not being clear its my first time asking. – Matthew Quebec Oct 20 '17 at 15:22
• This is still a bit unclear to me. Are points awarded simply for trying? Are you placing limit on the number of questions they can try or on the number of attempts per question? Also, what are your learning goals & their metrics? Are you measuring retention via correct answers, exploration via # of categories / questions attempted or something else? – Pikalek Oct 20 '17 at 15:59
• *Looks at Stack Exchnage. Looks at the reputation mechanics. Looks at how the system has checks and balances in place...* – Draco18s no longer trusts SE Oct 20 '17 at 16:42
• @Pikalek Yes, they are awarded immediately by trying to post or answer a question. No, we are not gonna place a limit in posting a question, but in answering, they can only do it once per specific question. The goal here is for them to acquire 100 points in total by answering questions from 8 different categories. We have not yet looked in to other factors besides the number of unanswered,answered, and total number of questions per category. – Matthew Quebec Oct 20 '17 at 16:53