in reply to Test validity

I don't know if I'd consider it the very best test i've ever taken. However, speaking as a manager and a CTO, if someone came to me and has Master Perl certification from brainbench it would at least tell me that they had enough skills to be dangerous with it ;)

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RE: RE: Test validity
by KM (Priest) on May 26, 2000 at 20:10 UTC
    Why wouldn't it just tell you that they were smart enough to have a book and terminal handy while taking it? Any test in a non-controlled environment is suspect to cheating, and is therefore invalid.

    Cheers,
    KM

      Well, they do say you are allowed to use online references and books, so that's part of the reason for the time limit. In the real world, you're not expected to know everything, but you had better know how to find the answers.

      I scored higher than I expected, though (4.21). I was thinking I got more answers wrong than that. I certainly don't feel like a Certified Master Perl Programmer when I see some of the posts on Perl Monks :)

      One thing they could improve on: they give you lots of examples and ask "What does this print out?". It's trivial to cut and paste their code from the test window into an xterm and run it and get the result without having to think about it critically. They could fix this by having the code printed inside a PNG image using GD or something similar, so cut-and-paste would be not be an option.

      Hmm, maybe Perl Monks could start some sort of certification program...

        Good idea. They should have the code in a non-cut-paste format. I didn't see that they said you can use online help, I simply went for the test.
        I think the idea of Perl Monks starting a cert program is bad. I do hope you were joking. For any one group to start a cert program, they need to have some kind of credibility in the subject and industry. This topic does come up from time to time on other parts of the community which a am regular. I haven't seen anything come of it yet.

        Cheers,
        KM

      In my academic experience, take-home tests were far more difficult than in-class closed-book exams since they were made with the knowledge that we would use any means available to find answers.

      Grr...brainbench crashed Netscape. I guess I'll skip the test.

        Well, I scored a 4.53 when Netscape didn't crash. But I don't know what that's supposed to mean when the "correct" answers are backslashing non-special characters like < & > in regexes and using map in a void context.