The contest begins at 10:00:37 p.m. on the Friday of the last full weekend in January. It ends at around midnight on Sunday for a total of approximately 50 consecutive hours. Students are appointed "trivia masters" and they administer the contest. Every year, a new lead trivia master, called the "Head Master," is appointed by the previous Head Master. The Head Master has the final say on any disputes. About 12 Trivia masters make up the questions, and teams are given 3 minutes to answer each question, which is done via telephone. Students volunteer to answer phones at the WLFM studios during all 50 hours of the contest. All teams that answer the question receive its points. Most questions are worth 5 points each. In the early years of the contest, teams researched using massive numbers of books; now teams find answers using computers on the internet. At the end of the contest, several difficult questions called are asked. Teams are given 10 minutes for the first few garrudas. The final, most difficult question - dubbed the "Super Garruda" - is worth 100 points and teams are given 30 minutes. The endeavor is governed by the Trivia Credo: "Trivia is meant to be entertainment and should be perceived solely in that light." The teams with the highest scores are declared the winners in on-campus and off-campus categories, receiving prizes such as pink plastic flamingos and stainless-steel bedpans. The Great Midwest Trivia Contest is known as the "World's Longest Running Trivia Contest" because of its custom of having the university's president ask the previous year's Super Garruda as the first question of the next year's contest. Questions used include "What was Holden Caulfield's middle name?" and "In 2004, which nation drank the most coffee per capita?" The 2009 Super Garruda was "Who was going to be married next to what was the "World's Largest Cedar Bucket" in Murfreesboro, Tennessee in June 2005, before it mysteriously burned down the week before the wedding date?". On-campus teams are occasionally asked to do special action questions such as composing a love song or doing a dance routine based on a theme.
History
The contest was founded in 1966 by James Bailey deRosset as an alternate for a serious academic retreat with professors. deRosset visited his girlfriend at Beloit College; he was disappointed with Beloit trivia contest and had ideas on how he wanted to improve on their contest. deRosset spoke with his friend, Junior Dave Pfleger, who worked at WLFM and arranged airtime. The first contest consisted of questions in four categories that were written by deRosset and his friends. The first question asked in 1966 was "Who was Superman's father?". The first winners received a broken refrigerator as their prize. It may be the oldest college-based radio trivia contest in the United States. Lawrence's inaugural edition on April 29, 1966 predates both the presumed May debut of the biannual Williams College Trivia Contest by a week or so and the February 1969 debut of the Stevens Point Media Trivia Contest by three years. However, the precise date of the first Williams contest is not known; before its playing schedule was standardized, spring semester Williams Trivia games were sometimes held as early as February and March. Teams originally had to be within about to receive the FM signal for WLFM. The radio station changed to internet broadcast and the first internet-only contest was held in 2006. The 50th annual contest was held in 2015 and it featured teams as far away as Sweden. The question difficulty had grown significantly because the teams could quickly find answers to simple questions using Google and the internet. Several Head Masters and deRosset returned for the contest. The contest had amassed over 18,000 questions in 2450 hours of competition by the end of the 2014 contest. The 50th contest featured one question per hour taken from a previous contest.
