Definitely not smarter than a fifth grader

Cafe Society
1

I watched “Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?” for the first time last night. Did anyone else see it?

Are the contestants always so stupid? Do they tell them to act extra stupid to make the kids look smarter or something?

The woman I watched had to use one of her “cheats” because she wasn’t sure how to calculate the radius of a circle when given the diameter!

She had no clue how to answer “the density of an object is calculated by dividing its mass by its [blank]”. No idea at all. When Jeff Foxworthy asked her to come up with a guess, she said “I don’t know, air?”.

Yes, the density of an object is calculated as its mass divided by its air. :rolleyes: I mean, not everybody would be able to get that one, but what a lame guess.

She struggled for a long time over the (verbal only) question “how many letters in the work ‘yak’”. She claims she has heard the word before, but has never seen it written.

Yet somehow, she miraculously makes it all the way to the $500 000 question. At this point, she gives up and walks away with $300 000. The question she declines to answer (which is in the First Grade World Geography category) is something like “which continent is also a country”? While thinking the question through, she listed all 7 continents correctly. However, she also said something like “OK, let’s see, there’s North America, well, that’s a country…”. At this time, she still has her “save” cheat, which means that even if she answered wrong, if the kid got it right she would have got the $500K. When Mr. Foxworthy asked her what she would have said if she had to guess, she replied “all of them”?

Wow. I don’t think I will watch that show any more. It made me angry.

On a side note, I thought the kids were kind of creepy. They reminded me of those terrible overacting hams on Barney.

2

I saw it. They all need to die. When she missed the one about the nation/continent, after she already said it out loud, I wanted her to just trip over a mic cord and bash her stupid head on the stupid floor and bleed to death on national tv.

3

Yeah, she said something like:

“Let’s see. There’s North America, well, that’s a country. South America, Africa, Asia, Europe, Antarctica, Australia. Hmm. Let’s see. I’m not sure.”

I can only guess that she thinks that North America = United States of America. Then, surely she knows Australia is a country, so maybe she was confused because it seemed to her that there were two correct answers.

Anyway, if they’re always that dumb, I don’t think I could watch another episode. It’s not the kind of dumb I can laugh at, it’s the kind that makes me angry.

Good for her for getting $300K (minus taxes) out of it though, I guess.

4

Yeah, I’m always glad when stupid people get a leg up, financially. Especially when they’re taking it from people who prey on other folks’ stupidity for fun and profit. I was just stunned that she missed that question.

I’m with you. It’s infuriating! :mad:

5

I’m convinced that there’s a test you have to fail to be on that show. I watched the first three episodes (I think I saw a total of 20 questions in three shows), and gave up.

6

(missed the edit window)

Gave up on watching it, that is. I don’t think there were more than two questions on the first three shows that my wife, teenager, and I couldn’t all answer correctly.

7

I’ve heard rumors to that effect. Shows like Jeopardy test you to make sure you’re smart enough to make it on. I’ve heard they do something similar for shows like Millionare, 1 vs. 100, and this show. Obviously if you score dismally low, they don’t let you on; but I’ve heard if you score too high they don’t either.

To relate to the OP, I’ve seen the show once, and I couldn’t believe the kinds of questions these people needed help on. Then, when they can’t figure it out and get the help of one of the fifth graders, they don’t even show the faintest hint of embarassment.

…I’m not so surprised that these people are willing to embarass themselves for a nice chunk of change (especially at their level of intelligence :stuck_out_tongue: ). What bothers me more is that these kinds of shows survive because people are entertained by watching morons willfully make fools of themselves for money. These shows are the intellectual equivalent of eating bugs and sheep brains on Fear Factor. :rolleyes:

8

I think it’s less important how you score smarts-wise than how you score “Goofy-bubbly-irritating-personality-wise.” Seriously…they can all take the pipe as far as I’m concerned.

9

I sort-of watch the show (flip between it and another show – there are plenty of pauses). I think I’ve not known about 3 questions total. The only one I rememebr was what current geological era are we in?

Cenozoic

I might have guessed that, but I wasn’t sure. Most of the questions are VERY simple.

Brian

10

I watched it, and some lady got the question “If y=3x and 3x=12, what does y equal?”.

She quit, and said she would have answered 4. I almost smashed my TV.

11

It’s called “No Adult Left Behind”.
I’d love to see the equivalent of a Ken Jennings or John Carpenter whip through all the questions without even waiting for Foxworthy to read the multiple-choice answers, then sneer and spit at the kids on the way out.

12

I’m catching an ep of 1 vs 100 right now and I actually like the female contestant. She reasons out her answers succinctly, though she used her lifelines because she wasn’t sure if the “D” stamped on some coins meant Detroit or Denver. She used her “Ask the Mob” option, letting her talk to two mob members, one of who has locked in a correct answer and one who has the answer wrong. One member asked to justify his answer said only that he went with his gut. It occurs to me that the member has absolutely no incentive to explain his answer - he should actually be as unconvincing as possible (without making it too obvious) because he only wins if the contestant is wrong.

13

I was a math major in high school but that phrasing confused the heck out of me. For a couple seconds anyway. I guess cause its a grammar school math question!

The lady with the ‘how many letters in yak’ was the first time I’d seen that show. What I didn’t understand is that the question before that one seemed a lot harder (she had to identify the adverb in a sentence). I mean, comparatively anyway. It was still an easy question (they all seem to be).

14

I don’t get it. This looks to me like a show that was designed from the ground up to be a total failure.

I mean, look at how Who Wants to Be a Millionaire worked. Sure, there were ridiculously easy questions, but those were just to get the contestant in the game (and occasionally provide a YouTube moment when someone got a wrong one before the first safe point). You had to know your stuff to get deep, and you had to be really sharp to win the million. Despite that, someone did win the million, and others followed. It was tense, unpredictable drama that produced lots and lots of priceless highlights, many of them totally unexpected (Richard Hatch, anyone?)

Now you have this kiddie game show (literally) where only a total moron can’t go far…which means that the producers have to find total morons, many of which are just about unwatchable. And of course, no confident morons need apply, because we have to be sure that they’ll collapse like a rusted-out wheelbarrow and NEVER…NEVER…EVER go for the million, even if it’s a subject they know inside and out. Oh yeah, special preference to those true gluttons for punishment who invariably give the correct answer after dropping out.

In other words, nobody ever wins the million, but pretty much everyone drags it far longer than they should. Predictable as an episode of Men Behaving Badly. Where’s the appeal? How does this not get old within a month?

15

If you watched the show more often, you’d see that the people playing are not total morons. At least, not on paper. The producers actually go out of their way to find people with college degrees and (usually) high GPA’s. A person on the other night had a 4.0 GPA in high school and had a degree from a good college. Hell, they had a NASA rocket scientist on a few weeks ago.

Why they seem so stupid on the show is a mystery. Here are the possibilities:

  1. Performing under pressure with lights and cameras on you and millions of peoople watching is not at all like playing at home.

  2. Answering the question when hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line messes up your brain and your memory.

  3. The people they get are specialists, and you need to be a generalist to go far.

  4. They only seem stupid because the people talking about it in this thread are much smarter than average, or the people on the SDMB are much more widely read and knowledgeable than average.

  5. It’s an illusion. The game actually is fairly hard, but the odds are that the questions the players don’t know are going to be ones you do know, so you think they are stupid. The questions you don’t know seem like the hard ones, simply because you don’t know them.

Sure, the show seems dreadfully easy to me. I rarely see a question I don’t know the answer to, except for the ones that aren’t really applicable to a Canadian (American geography and history sometimes trip me up). But I’ve gone several episodes in a row without missing a question, so often the players seem jaw-droppingly stupid.

Finally, I’ve seen a numbre of players make it to 500,000, so the game is actually pretty easy. Certainly not as hard as Millionaire. But that’s it’s appeal. People like to feel smart. It’s more curious to me that large audiences like watching game shows where the questions are very obscure and they don’t know the answer to many of them. It seems more likely to expect people to watch shows where they can believe they are smarter than the contestant than ones which just make them feel dumb and uneducated.

For me, the biggest advantage of this show is that the questions are easy enough for my fifth-grade daughter. So it’s the only game show we can watch as a family and all participate in. My guess is that this is the source of its good ratings - it’s a family-friendly game show.

16

The thing I think is interesting about the show is that the fifth-graders, though cute and entertaining, aren’t doing this off the top of their heads- the credits of the show state they went over the subject matter beforehand. In other words, they were taught it in preparation to be asked about it- just like in school. Actually, now that I think about it, that would be an interesting reality game show in itself- contestants who aren’t that bright have to go back to school in order to prepare for a big quiz.

17

The bit that gets me is first off, they find the most nit-picky things to ask about. I mean, really fine details that you learn in school, but only really need to know to pass next week’s test.

Second, I firmly believe that not all the questions are taught in ALL fifth-grade classrooms. I know we didn’t do anything with pi, or geometry(radius, circumference, area) until 7th grade, or anything at all with decimals until 6th(long division still used remainders).

18

I’ve never seen the show, but I’ll admit that I’ve always been afraid that, were I ever a contestant on a game show, my brain would lock up and I’d be unable to bring up the answer to even a grade-school question.

19

Two people have gone for the million on the show - and missed the question.

The one major flaw in the design of the show is that the incentives for going for the million are completely skewed. No one should go for it. It takes a moron to decide to go for it. No matter how well you know a subject, I guarantee I could find something from the grade 5 curriculum that you wouldn’t know. And you know the question is going to be hard, and you don’t get to see it. Why would anyone make a 50/50 bet on an unknown like that?

If they want more people to go for the million, they should change the game so that once you get to the $500,000 question, you get to keep $250,000 even if you’re wrong. Then you’d be getting 2:1 odds to go for the unknown question, which seems to me to be much more realistic.

Because people enjoy watching the journey? It’s not about whether you’ll win the million - it’s hearing the questions, seeing if you know the answer, comparing your performance against the contestant’s, and watching the whole drama with the little kids saving adults, Jeff Foxworthy making snarky comments (and yet being a rather appealing host), etc. It’s the entire package.

I think the show could use some improvements. For one thing, speed up the damned game. I hate this new trend in game shows to drag out every answer, make the contestant talk it through, have dramatic pauses before the big ‘reveal’ of the answer, and all that rubbish. Thank God for PVRs, because you can watch this show in about 20 minutes by fast-forwarding and still get all the essentials.

Another thing they should do is stop announcing the results as the show is starting. Having the announcer state at the beginning, “Tonight, our contestant goes all the way to the million dollar question!” is assinine. Why on earth would they announce the results before the game starts? It makes no sense.

20

That’s strange. Why not just get smart kids? Reward them in some way for their academic achievements - maybe pariticipants get a college trust fund or something. I’d have known at least 90% of the sort of stuff they asked when I was that age (I’ve only actually caught half an episode, so I’m going by the impression of the difficulty).