Penn Students Designed Buzzfeed Quizzes in This Wharton Class, and Some Really Sucked

In one Wharton class, groups of students were tasked with creating Buzzfeed quizzes that would resonate with some target audience. Students used strategies they learned in this “Advertising Management” class to design their quiz, and some of them went viral on Buzzfeed, which was cool. Some of the other ones really sucked.

In particular, a quiz entitled “Choose Some Dirt Piles and We’ll Tell You What Kind of Dustpan to Use” was really just not very good. Intended as an informative quiz for people looking for advice on how to clean particular dirt piles, the quiz was mistaken as a personality test with deep implications for the present and future of the users. As if a quiz could really tell you anything about your life!

Several other quizzes were equally as bad.  A quiz called “Design your Ideal Bedroom and We’ll Tell You if Your Parents are Proud of You” received some harsh feedback from commenters on the site. One person's result: “You are a failure and your parents are not proud of you. Maybe if you earned as much money as Heather they would be proud of you. Why aren’t you more like Heather?” He added, “My sister’s name is not even Heather, it’s Hannah. And I don’t earn as much as her because I’m doing something way more fulfilling - pursuing my music.”

When asked his opinion on these quizzes, the professor admitted that "these students are all stupid.” Granted, we asked a different professor (“Dastardly” Professor Robert McElroy) instead of the Professor for Advertising Management because it saved us some time, and honestly we haven’t been spending enough time doing nothing recently.