How Insporta writes a test

An Insporta test is ten questions on one subject, each with four options and one correct answer, written so that the only thing standing between a learner and a full score is knowledge of the sport. Every question carries an explanation, a source and a topic tag, and every batch of questions is written to nine rules that were each learned from a defect that reached a learner. This article is the map; each rule has its own page.

The unit is ten questions

A test is exactly ten questions, never nine or eleven. Each question has one stem, one key and three distractors, and asks one thing. Tests sit inside sub-levels, sub-levels inside levels, and levels form a ladder of ten from Beginner to Professional for each sport. How that ladder is sized is described in Levels and sub-levels.

Ten is small enough to finish in a few minutes and large enough that a score means something: with four options a learner guessing at random averages two and a half correct, so eight or more out of ten is not luck.

Recall and applied

Each question is written as one of two kinds. A recall question asks what something is: which term the Laws use for a careless challenge, how far the penalty mark is from the goal line. An applied question gives a situation and asks what follows: a defender handles the ball while the play is in progress, what is the restart. Both kinds are needed. Recall shows a learner knows the vocabulary of the sport; applied shows they can use it. This follows the distinction between declarative and procedural knowledge that the research on sport cognition draws, described in Three levels of cognition.

What every question carries

Beyond the stem and four options, a question is not complete without three things:

Field	What it is for
Explanation	One or two sentences on why the key is right. This is the learner’s feedback and it is read as settled fact, so it is written with care, see Evidence, claims and safety.
Source	The rulebook clause, technical report or coaching reference the question was authored from, for example “IFAB Laws of the Game 2025/26, Law 12”. The source is cited here and never mentioned in the stem.
Topic tag	A short label, unique across the whole sport, naming the one fact the question tests. Unique tags are what make it possible to find two questions teaching the same thing.

Difficulty is not a field. The level number is the difficulty.

The nine rules in one screen

Rule	In one sentence	Detail
1. Stay inside the construct	A question tests knowledge of the sport, not the learner’s brain, body or reading speed.	What a question may measure
2. Stand alone	A question is answerable by anyone who knows the sport, without a document in hand.	A question must stand on its own
3. Even reading load	Stems of 60 to 180 characters, options of comparable length, and the key must not be the longest option more often than chance.	Reading load and length
4. Distractors are load-bearing	Three wrong answers, each plausible to the half-informed and clearly false to the informed. No invented rules, no absolutes the key does not carry.	How distractors are built
5. Neither overclaim nor under-claim	Contested positions are presented as contested; well-evidenced ones are not hedged away. Numbers carry a date.	Evidence, claims and safety
6. Safety facts repeat	A warning about harm may appear in every sub-level that leads to the hazard, and it names where to go.	Evidence, claims and safety
7. No question twice	The question must be new, not merely the topic. One fact is asked once.	No question twice
8. Required fields	Explanation, source, topic tag and reasoning type on every question.	This page
9. Self-check, then gates	The author checks the batch against the rules before anyone else sees it, then it passes structural, duplicate and fact-check gates.	Fact-checking and quality gates

Why the rules look like this

The rules are not a style guide. Each one protects a measurement. Rule 3 exists because response time is recorded alongside correctness, so a stem twice the length of its neighbours measures reading speed. Rule 4 exists because a distractor that is quietly true breaks the statistics later used to calibrate the question. Rule 2 exists because a question that asks what “the document” says cannot be answered by someone who simply knows the sport, and in one early batch 29 of 100 questions were written that way.

The rules also follow from what the research says a knowledge test can and cannot claim. Insporta measures sport-specific declarative and procedural knowledge and says so; it does not claim to measure intelligence or executive function, because the evidence that generic cognitive tests predict sporting level is weak, as set out in Sport-specific knowledge beats generic brain training and How Insporta applies the research.

Where the questions come from

Questions are authored from primary sources: the IFAB Laws of the Game for football, the FIFA Futsal Laws of the Game and Coaching Manual for futsal, the MCC Laws of Cricket and ICC Playing Conditions for cricket, and the World Triathlon and Ironman competition rules for triathlon, with technical reports and coaching literature for tactics and craft. Nothing is reproduced; every question is original wording with its source cited. The full list is in Sources we write from.

What happens before a test is published

An author’s batch goes through gates in order of cost: structure and length checks that a machine can run, a duplicate review by a reader with the neighbouring levels in front of them, and a fact check by a person against the primary source, verifying all four options of every question. Facts confirmed along the way are recorded in a per-sport register so that a later author cannot reintroduce an error a reviewer already fixed. Those registers are public: football, cricket, futsal, triathlon.