Subject: RE: General opinion wanted
arthur@corlissfamily.org
Date: Thu Nov 29 2001 - 16:02:44 AKST
Thanks for the reply, Joe. I've been wondering what kind of market
penetration these guys have been getting, and how well recieved they are.
You make some good points about needing a controlled environment to increase
the accurracy of the tests, but I would hold with a few caveats: I place much
more emphasis on good research skills than I do good memory (partly because
that's how I manage to survive ;-). I don't think it's necessarily a bad
thing to allow someone being tested access to man pages, etc. In theory, the
results should be the same if they actually had to do that task in a
production environment. Any production environment operating without
documentation is just begging for problems.
I do agree about the code snippet bit, though. Having access to a development
environment, etc., is a tad on the cheating side. One should be able to
predict the results of code, queries, etc., just by analysing them on paper,
without actually running them.
Even so, I would think that there's only such much one could cheat on those
tests, since a) they still need to know how to use the tools to verify them,
and b) there should be some questions on purely theoretical aspects (like pros
and cons of OO versus procedural, advantages to polymorphism in objects, etc.)
that no API reference or code snippet is going to answer.
In any event, that was a great post. :-) Just the kind of information I was
looking for--both an employer's and a test-taker's perspective. Anyone else
want to weigh in with some experiences?
--Arthur Corliss
Bolverk's Lair -- http://arthur.corlissfamily.org/
"Live Free or Die, the Only Way to Live" -- NH State Motto
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a23 : Thu Nov 29 2001 - 16:02:43 AKST