Despite what others are saying here I think take-home tests are a great idea. What is a terrible idea however is requiring that a candidate complete your take-h

Despite what others are saying here I think take-home tests are a great idea. What is a terrible idea however is requiring that a candidate complete your take-home test, that you wrote and will administer. It is simply not reasonable to expect a candidate to complete such an exam for every company he applies to, oftentimes before he even talks to a human being and usually before he has a face-to-face or a phone interview with an engineer. There simply aren't enough hours in the day, even if you're unemployed. And there aren't, to my knowledge, any really good and widely-used sites that a prospective job-seeker could use to establish his skills, which any random company likely will look at and accept as canon. And so we're all in a bit of a bind.