The company I work for has prospective developers write something that parses Java property files, and sample files are given to them to examine. It is amazing

The company I work for has prospective developers write something that parses Java property files, and sample files are given to them to examine. It is amazing how many are unable to write something to do this. Additional small-grained programmer behaviors are also discovered besides if they can code the answer: do they comment their code, do they structure it, name it in a thought out manner or use X,Y, and Z as variable and function names? Do they use exception handling? It is a pretty useful test and filters out people who have head knowledge but inability to do a simple task, or have impressive resumes that mean nothing.