Great Substack from mad Ming Moonraker (2,4,7)
In a quixotic turn of events, our start of term Substack is on...the relative difficulty of the Guardian cryptic crossword over the last century.View quoted post on X
Comparative Judgement is amazing at measuring the difficulty of tests over time. We used it for a study on A-level maths a few years ago. The obvious follow-up was to use it for cryptic crosswords!
Our CEO is Mycroft Holmes level good at cryptics. I am more like a Baker Street Irregular. We recruited a lot of judges via the crossword website fifteensquared and got the help of the Guardian's Boatman setter too (Ashley Knowles).
We had great fun doing this study, and in the post you can see a list of the crossword clues our judges found the hardest. Some of them are REALLY hard!
substack.nomoremarking.com/p/the-difficul…
