I have to think that on a Board of this intellectual caliber there have been some people whohave tried out for Jeaopardy!.
Can anyone give me some tips or ideas on how to best go through the process? Can anyone describe the process?
I’ve just signed up for an audition in Chicago (nearby), and I know there’s a 50-question test given at the audition. I thinkyou have to egt 35 correct to go to the next level of audition.
So…assuming I get past the test, what happens next?
-Cem
Great timing, check out this Thread and ask Reloy3 about it.
I passed the Jeopardy! try-out today.
Jim
Once you pass the contestant exam, you’re still in a pool of contestants that has four times as many contestants as they can use in a year. What makes a difference first are demographic things: they like to get a nice mix of gender, geography, age, and occupation. You can’t do much about that, other than maybe change your job or move.
The other thing that will make a difference is personality. They like interesting people, people the audience will like and will root for. So be an interesting and funny person when they interview you at the contestant tryouts (after you’ve passed the exam).
And – have five interesting anecdotes about yourself. At the tryouts, they give you a questionnaire and ask for that, and those anecdotes are what Alex uses when he talks to you during the game (“I understand you had a memorable experience while hitchhiking through Tanzania…”). Start thinking about those anecdotes now, and if you can’t think of any, ask your family and friends. Then polish those stories until they shine.
First off, congratulations!
Walloon’s advice is excellent. I qualified about eight years ago during regional tryouts in Cleveland, but they never called me to appear on the show. I was told that lawyers have a harder time getting on the show, as they have so damn many lawyers qualify and like to have a variety of professions. I guess that held true for me (it can’t have been that I wasn’t sparkly and interesting enough!)
CNN.com has a story today about the show’s new online qualifying test.
Walloon…thanks!
I f a Mod woudl like to close this out, please do so…I’llpiggyback the existing thread.
-Cem
Jeppardy is going to offer a tryout test online from March 28-30. From what I heard on the news this morning, it is 50 questions and if you do well enough, they’ll set a face to face with you.
I signed up for the electronic tryout; I think it’s 20 questions. But if you pass, it appears that your prize is a seat at the in-person 50-question tryout. Which is valuable, because many more people sign up than there are seats available, but I don’t know if it’s worth a whole 'nother weed-out stage where you’re risking a bad break on the questions.
The other thing is that after I signed up, the page said that you get only x seconds for each answer and then it moves on with no way to go back. The one time I did get a seat at a in-person tryout, I know I got at least two questions right because several times I wrote an easy answer quickly and then had three or four extra seconds to revisit an earlier response I hadn’t gotten.
–Cliffy
Back in 1997 or so, Jeopardy announced a weekend (Saturday and Sunday) of open tryouts at the Merv Griffin Hotel and Casino (of course) in Atlantic City. Since that was only an hour or two away from my home in Maryland, a friend and I decided to make the road trip. We figured we could drive up to Jersey on Friday night, hang out and blow a few bucks at the tables, stay over, then do the tryout Saturday morning and drive back afterwards.
The “tryout” was really just a cattle call. My friend and I registered (name, address, etc.) and were herded into a ballroom with about 200 other people. The purpose of registering was to make sure that nobody came back and tried again the same day (there were four tryout times each day). Everyone got a photocopied sheet with 10 typewritten trivia questions on it, and we were informed we had 20 minutes to complete them. Everyone who got 7 or more of them right would be eligible for the next round of tryouts.
The questions were pretty difficult – far harder than 95% of actual Jeopardy questions. They were pretty similar to the tougher, more obscure questions in a Trivial Pursuit game. I had assumed I would get 7 out of 10 easily, since I usually got better than 9 out of 10 right watching Jeapordy from my couch. However, after 20 minutes of puzzling it out, my friend and I found that we’d gotten the same six questions right and were so stumped by the other four that we’d left them blank. We were informed, along with the other losers, that we were ineligible to try again that day, but could come back tomorrow.
Walking down to lunch frustrated, we came up with a great idea. “Let’s stick around and try again tomorrow. We can hang out in Atlantic City for another day. Sure, the questions were tough, but part of that may just have been chance. Maybe tomorrow’s questions will line up better with our collective knowledge base.”
So we did. We came back the next day, went through the same registration rigamarole, and were once again herded into the ballroom and handed a photocopied question sheet.
With the same exact ten questions on it.
The word you’re looking for is “AAARRRGGGHH.” Or perhaps “duh.” A simple trip to the library or five minutes on the internet would have yielded the missing answers, but we never suspected the questions would be the same. We outsmarted ourselves.
So I was never on Jeopardy. All I had to show for my weekend in Atlantic City was about $200 worth of craps losses and the fact that the Gallipoli Peninsula and gastrocnemius muscles are still burned into my memory, nine years later.