UCLA Trivia
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45 free UCLA trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
40 free UCLA trivia questions with answers. UCLA started as a teachers' college on Vermont Avenue, moved to a Westwood bean field in 1929 and became the most applied-to university in America. This quiz covers the campus and its history: the four original Romanesque buildings, the Janss brothers' cut-price land deal, the Nobel laureates, the room in Boelter Hall where the internet sent its first two letters, and the Bruin nickname that Berkeley students donated. Sports fans get plenty: John Wooden's ten titles and 88-game streak, Pauley Pavilion, the record 126 NCAA team championships, the Olympic medal count, and the USC rivalry with its railroad-locomotive Victory Bell. There are also questions on the alumni, from Jackie Robinson and Arthur Ashe to Ralph Bunche, Francis Ford Coppola and the Doors, and on campus traditions like Spring Sing and Joe and Josephine Bruin. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the university, the Bruins and their people, and each question carries its source. Difficulty runs from things every applicant knows to details only a Bruin alum would remember.
30 of 45 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What are UCLA's school colours?
Blue and gold
Blue and gold are shared with the University of California; UCLA says its blue evokes the sea and sky and its gold the sun and the California poppy. Cardinal and gold belong to crosstown rival USC.
Q 02What kind of school was UCLA's forerunner before joining the University of California in 1919?
A teachers' college
A teachers' college, the Los Angeles State Normal School, became the university's Southern Branch after its head Ernest Moore and Regent Edward Dickson pushed the plan past a reluctant university leadership.
Q 03UCLA's pre-Westwood campus on Vermont Avenue in East Hollywood is now home to what?
Los Angeles City College
Los Angeles City College opened there in 1929 as a junior college, the year the university left a 25-acre Vermont Avenue campus it had outgrown.
Q 04Which family's investment company sold UCLA its Westwood site at a deep discount?
Janss
Janss Investment Company, run by brothers Edwin and Harold Janss, took about $1 million for land worth several times that, then developed Westwood Village and the neighbourhoods around the new campus.
Q 05Which future Nobel chemist enrolled at UCLA in 1929?
Glenn Seaborg
Glenn Seaborg arrived in 1929 as valedictorian of Jordan High School in Watts and went on to help discover plutonium; element 106 was later named seaborgium in his honour.
Q 06Which of these was one of the four original buildings around the Westwood quad?
Haines Hall
Haines Hall, originally the Chemistry Building, was one of the four; the others were Royce Hall, the College Library (now Powell) and the Physics-Biology Building, now Kaplan Hall.
Q 07The twin towers of Royce Hall reference which famous Italian church?
Sant'Ambrogio in Milan
Royce Hall's twin towers echo Sant'Ambrogio in Milan, a Lombard Romanesque basilica; the architects Allison & Allison used that style for the whole building.
Q 08Royce Hall is named after Josiah Royce, who was what?
A philosopher
A philosopher: Josiah Royce, born in the mining town of Grass Valley, California, went to Harvard in 1882 as a one-year stand-in for William James and made his career there.
Q 09UCLA's teams became the Bruins because Montana, a conference rival, already used which nickname?
Grizzlies
Grizzlies was the teams' name in the mid-1920s, but Montana already held it in the Pacific Coast Conference they were joining, so the students switched to another bear and became the Bruins.
Q 10What are the names of UCLA's costumed bear mascots?
Joe and Josephine Bruin
Joe and Josephine Bruin took over from live bears: the first Josephine, bought by alumni in 1961, lived in the Rally Committee chairman's backyard until she grew too large and went to the San Diego Zoo.
Q 11The first ARPANET message was sent from UCLA in 1969 to which institution?
Stanford Research Institute
Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park received the message on 29 October 1969; the system crashed after two letters, so the first transmitted characters were 'lo'.
Q 12The first ARPANET message was sent in 1969 from room 3420 of which UCLA engineering building?
Boelter Hall
Boelter Hall housed the SDS Sigma 7 host computer and the first Interface Message Processor, making the engineering building the network's first node.
Q 13Which UCLA computer scientist ran the lab that became the ARPANET's first node in 1969?
Leonard Kleinrock
Q 21As of 2026, where do the Bruins play their home football games?
The Rose Bowl in Pasadena
The Bruins have played home games at The Rose Bowl in Pasadena since 1982; their only national title came in 1954, when a no-repeat rule kept them out of a Rose Bowl showdown with Ohio State.
Q 22How many NCAA men's basketball titles did John Wooden win at UCLA?
10
Wooden won 10 NCAA titles in his last 12 seasons, seven of them in a row, yet the first did not come until 1964, his 16th season in Westwood.
Q 23John Wooden earned which nickname 'of Westwood'?
The Wizard
The Wizard of Westwood was a name Wooden never liked, saying he was no wizard; his teams also set a men's college record with 88 consecutive wins.
Leonard Kleinrock supervised the student who typed the first message, and his UCLA software team, including Steve Crocker, Jon Postel and Vint Cerf, wrote the network's first host-to-host protocol.
Q 14UCLA alumnus Ralph Bunche won the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize for what?
Negotiating an Arab-Israeli armistice
Negotiating an Arab-Israeli armistice fell to Bunche after the UN's chief mediator, Folke Bernadotte, was assassinated in 1948; the 1949 agreements made him the first African American Nobel laureate.
Q 15Which UCLA astronomer shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics?
Andrea Ghez
Andrea Ghez shared the 2020 prize with Reinhard Genzel: since the 1990s each had led a team tracking stars that whip around the Milky Way's centre, and their orbits revealed a supermassive black hole there.
Q 16UCLA pharmacologist Louis Ignarro shared the 1998 Nobel for discovering the signalling role of which molecule?
Nitric oxide
Nitric oxide was known as an air pollutant from car exhausts until it was shown to tell blood vessels to relax; the finding led to new impotence drugs, and Ignarro has been nicknamed the 'Father of Viagra'.
Q 17UCLA's medical school is named after which entertainment mogul?
David Geffen
David Geffen gave $200 million in 2002, and the school took his name; the health system's flagship hospital is named after Ronald Reagan.
Q 18Which athletic conference did the Bruins join in 2024 on leaving the Pac-12?
The Big Ten
The Big Ten admitted UCLA and USC for the 2024-25 season, putting two Los Angeles schools in a conference founded in 1896 as a Midwestern league.
Q 19As of 2026, UCLA's total of NCAA team championships trails only which school?
Stanford
Stanford leads the all-time NCAA team championship count, with UCLA second; the Bruins were the first school to reach 100 titles, when women's water polo won in 2007.
Q 20Which UCLA alumnus lit the Olympic cauldron at the 1984 Los Angeles Games?
Rafer Johnson
Rafer Johnson, the 1960 Olympic decathlon champion and a UCLA alumnus, climbed the steps of the Coliseum to light the cauldron at the 1984 opening ceremony.
Q 24John Wooden was the first person inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in which two categories?
Player and coach
Player and coach: Wooden was enshrined as a player in 1960, four years before he won his first national title as a coach, and again as a coach in 1973.
Q 25Where did John Wooden play his own college basketball?
Purdue
Purdue was Wooden's school, and the Midwest nearly kept him: in 1948 a snowstorm cut the phone lines before Minnesota could offer its job, so he said yes to UCLA and kept his word.
Q 26Which architect designed UCLA's Pauley Pavilion, opened in 1965?
Welton Becket
Welton Becket, whose firm also drew Hollywood's Capitol Records Building, designed the arena; regent Edwin Pauley matched the alumni's donations to get it built.
Q 27Kareem Abdul-Jabbar played at UCLA under what name?
Lew Alcindor
Lew Alcindor led UCLA to three straight titles from 1967; he converted from Catholicism to Islam and, from 1971, went by the name Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
Q 28Who led all scorers in the 1964 final that sealed UCLA's first unbeaten season?
Gail Goodrich
Gail Goodrich scored 27 as UCLA beat Duke 98-83 to finish 30-0, pressing full-court in a zone that assistant Jerry Norman had talked a reluctant Wooden into using.
Q 29The Victory Bell contested with USC originally came from what?
A Southern Pacific locomotive
A Southern Pacific locomotive supplied the bell; UCLA's alumni association gave it to students in 1939, USC students stole it in 1941, and the rivalry game has decided its owner since 1942.
Q 30Which UCLA center made 21 of 22 shots in the 1973 NCAA final?
Bill Walton
Bill Walton scored 44 points on 21-of-22 shooting against Memphis State in the 1973 final, a title-game scoring record, as UCLA won its seventh straight championship.