Re: [MacPerl-AnyPerl] The Perl Test...

[Richard Gordon <maccgi@bellsouth.net>]

At 23:21 -0400 7/12/1999, Ronald J Kimball wrote:
>Earlier this year, TekMetrics spammed clpmisc about their Perl
>certification.  Here's a link to one of the ads:
>
>http://www.deja.com/=dnc/getdoc.xp?AN=470226885
>
>I never bothered to take it, but a few other people did.  They posted their
>generally unflattering comments in the newsgroup.

Thanks for the info. My main gripe with computerific testing for 
something like Perl is that most people (perhaps just meaning me) 
aren't presented with 4 choices in a production situation, they have 
to build from scratch. This in turn means that most stuff won't work 
as envisioned the first time around and there is heavy reliance on 
syntax checking, to say nothing of the Camel, before the thing ever 
gets off of the ground.

So the hard stuff on the test (mostly analyzing subroutines and array 
or hash related things) strikes me as unworldly. In contrast, the 
easy stuff (e.g., who is the father of Perl?) strikes me as 
profoundly non-probative. I can see where it might be useful to use a 
computer test to see if a secretary can change a font in WordPerfect, 
but applying the same basic approach to Perl or SQL or whatever seems 
to be stretching a point. You can certainly judge typing ability with 
a computer, but it remains to be seen whether you can measure writing 
quality which is what this sort of comes down to.


Richard Gordon
--------------------
Gordon Consulting & Design
Database Design/Scripting Languages
mailto:richard@richardgordon.net
http://www.richardgordon.net
770.971.6887 (voice)
770.216.1829 (fax)

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