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Brainbench
2004-07-14 22:03 in /tech/perl
We’re contemplating ditching our home-grown test for job applicants and requesting they take one or more Brainbench tests instead. But, of course, we need to evaluate those tests and get some normalization. So, I took an hour this morning and took the Perl test. I am now officially a Perl Master. Whoot.
The test was fairly decent, although I was surprised how few, and how simple, the regular expression questions I got were. There were only about three or four and they were almost complete just about whether you know about maximal vs. minimal matching. I got a lot more questions about symbol tables and globs than I expected. I guess maybe it focuses in on that type of thing if it decides you are pretty good (the test is adaptive), although that’s the sort of thing that I think should only be used with extreme caution, even by experts. I also got one or two weird questions where I’m half-convinced there were typos or mis-wordings in the question. Unfortunately, I didn’t think to note them down at the time.
Addendum: I forgot to mention that there were a number of questions along the lines of, what does this script output, or, why does this fail? The rules for the test say that you can use reference materials, physical or online. They don’t explicitly forbid just running the code, but it seems like that shouldn’t be allowed. I restricted myself to Programming Perl and perldoc, but it was definitely tempting to just run the code a couple of times. This seems like a concern if we really want to use this for assessing candidates. I felt like I ought to email Brainbench and ask for clarification about this.
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