Most bad quiz questions aren't wrong. They're unfair — worded so a person who genuinely knows the material still gets it wrong, because the question was testing careful reading instead of the subject. That failure mode is worse for a toll than for a game, because a game losing you a point is a shrug and a toll losing you a point on a technicality is a reason to disable the blocker. We wrote rules to keep it from happening.
One fact, one skill
Every question earns its place by testing exactly one thing. Not "name the year and the general and the outcome" stacked into a single multi-part question that's really three questions wearing a trench coat — one clean fact or one clean skill, so a wrong answer tells you something specific rather than "somewhere in that pile of things, you slipped." A question that fails means you know precisely what to look at next. A question that tests four things at once just means you feel bad about something unspecified.
No trick wording
Double negatives, "which of the following is NOT" buried in a wall of similar-sounding options, answers that hinge on a comma — none of it. A question written to be misread isn't harder, it's just meaner, and meanness doesn't teach anything back. If getting a question right requires parsing the sentence twice, the sentence needs rewriting, not the reader.
No trivia for its own sake
There's a specific kind of question that exists only to be obscure — a footnote date, a name nobody would ever need again, correct but pointless. It's easy to write, because "hard to know" and "worth knowing" get confused constantly, and only one of them belongs in a bank that's supposed to leave you with something. We'd rather ask something you'll actually use again than something that only proves you once read a very specific paragraph.
What we're still unsure about
Ten questions per topic is not a lot of room to test one fact, one skill, cleanly, without repeating the same shape of question with the numbers swapped. Some topics handle that fine. Others start to feel thin by question eight, and we don't think padding them with a trick question just to hit a round number is the right trade — a topic with nine honest questions beats one with ten where the tenth is a gotcha. We're still working out where that line actually sits.