certification (Brainbench)

Mats Wichmann mats at laplaza.org
Fri Feb 22 16:34:51 EST 2002


:A worse issue I have with most tests (supervised or not) is their
:"quiz" nature.  Some people are very effective at taking quizzes (I,
:for one), and the correlation between that and the ability to
:perform useful work, while not null, isn't necessarily all that
:strong either.  For Python, at least, I think a few simple,
:well-specified programming tasks (one also requiring design,
:one working to a pre-specified design, one about fixing a bug
:in a given piece of code, another about adding functionality
:to another given piece of code) might well be more meaningful.
:
:Quizes are great for fun -- and some technologies don't really
:lend themselves well to directly testing a candidate's performance
:on somewhat meaningful tasks -- but Python does, so why not take
:advantage of that?

Because they're a lot harder to grade "automatically"?

When I had to write a final exam for a course I felt quite hamstrung
because the vendor uses only "read the bubbles on the form"
technology.  I know that testing technology is far more advanced than
that, but it's still easier to determin the results if the answers are
absolute, and not affected by, say, coding style.


Mats Wichmann




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