Every time a new TV game show hits it big, you can rightfully expect a video game adaption to arrive shortly thereafter. While some of these conversions have been decent — Family Feud on SNES and a handful of the Jeopardy!/Wheel of Fortune games come to mind — the majority of these titles are cheaply made cash-ins that only exist to sucker loyal fans of the show into an impulse buy. On that note, Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader? Make the Grade! has just arrived on the Wii, and it is pretty clear which of the above categories this one falls into.

The basis of 5th Grader is trivia; you pick from one of 10 multiple choice questions, each with varying difficulty levels and subjects ranging from World History and Math to English and Science. To help you answer all of these correctly, you are given 3 chances to “cheat” off of a 5th Grader of your choosing, which lets you look at and use their answers for that question. Each student is good at a few particular subjects, and you have to use their strengths wisely if you want to answer the more difficult questions and make it to the final round. If you are successful, you will have to answer one fill-in question, but you do not get to choose the subject or difficulty. Answering this correctly nets your avatar $1 million virtual dollars and saves them the embarrassment of telling the world that they are not smarter than a 5th grader.

 Once you get into a game, you will see that the difficulty balance in place for the questions seems almost like it was chosen at random, with questions such as “True or false: the city of Timbuktu had a famous university with a large library containing Greek and Roman books” and “Which author wrote ‘Miss Nelson Is Missing’” being listed at or around the same difficulty level as “Which season follows summer” and “Which of the following means the same as the word ‘talent?’: Lack, desire, gift, or job?” The million dollar questions are no better, as I was once asked “what is the past tense of hurt.” This balance kills the flow of the game, as the outcome feels less reliant on a player’s knowledge of the various subjects and more focused on how fair the questions in that particular match were that time around. The questions are either too easy or too hard, and the majority of them focus on obscure factoids or specific occurrences that most people wouldn’t know. Another problem with the questions, despite there being over 6,000 of them on the disk, is that I encountered some repeats after only a few games of play. Not recording what has already been asked in a trivia game is lazy, especially when so many others similar games, like Buzz and Scene-It, keep track.
 
The issues with 5th Grader don’t end there, as aside from the single or multiplayer version of the TV show, there is almost nothing else to do. There are two additional multiplayer modes for up to four players called Flashcards and Spelling Bee, but both are as barebones as can be. Flashcards removes the show aspect and just has each player answer 10 random questions as quickly as possible, and Spelling Bee has you choosing the incorrectly spelled word out of a list of four words. The problem with all of the modes in the game is that there are no configurable options. The game doesn’t let you tweak the amount of rounds, number of questions, or even the difficulty, leaving you with the same experience every time you play. An additional surprise that I discovered was that if your multiplayer session finishes with a tie, the game ends without giving you the chance to break it, leaving all involved players completely unsatisfied. There are also no minigames or online modes to be found, and the only unlockables are items for the shallow contestant creator, which allows you to create an in-game avatar but only gives you 3-4 options for each body/clothing section.