Help me with a ratings system (elo)

[bennyboy]

I'm making a body of questions for my English students, and I want a dynamic rating system to help kids get the right questions.  My idea is that each question, and each student, will have a rating (like chess rating).  Every time a student gets a question correct, his/her rating will go up a little bit, and the rating of the question will go down.

The point of this is that instead of having teachers guesstimate what level different questions are, the system will be able to collect statistics about each question, and give only those questions which are within an appropriate range from the student's.

Here's my problem: the questions may be multiple choice, which kind of breaks the zero-sum game effect of say a player-vs-player chess game.  If a very low-rated player luckily chooses the answer to a very hard question, or if a high-level student decides to deliberately answer all the questions on an easy test wrongly, it might screw things up.


Any ideas on how to make elo work in this case?

[Edwardo Piet]

My favorite game ever, age of empires 2, uses an ELO system with multiple players (up to 8 players). I don't know how the hell it does it and I myself have also been looking online for a system that applies for something more complex than 1 on 1 games like chess.

Try looking into LoL and DOTA 2 rating systems maybe as they may be pretty complex and you can maybe make a couple of changes to that to find the method you're looking for.

[bennyboy]

My favorite game ever, age of empires 2, uses an ELO system with multiple players (up to 8 players). I don't know how the hell it does it and I myself have also been looking online for a system that applies for something more complex than 1 on 1 games like chess.

Try looking into LoL and DOTA 2 rating systems maybe as they may be pretty complex and you can maybe make a couple of changes to that to find the method you're looking for.

Yeah, I've definitely thought about LoL specifically since I play it a lot.

I feel there's a specific method for non-zero sum games, like a specific constant or an added sub-function or something.  I feel I can ALMOST figure it out myself, but the light just hasn't come on yet.

I don't think the games you are mentioning are a problem to rate, because they are still a zero-sum game.

I'm tempted just to ignore the multi-choice effect and see how the numbers settle, but I'm worried there's a systemic issue that I'm just not smart enough to realize.