This is a Computer Science test, not a Software Engineering test. I think it's even worse as a test for the latter. I don't really agree that these questions t

This is a Computer Science test, not a Software Engineering test. I think it's even worse as a test for the latter. I don't really agree that these questions test debugging skill. In real life if I read a bit of confusing code and get tricked, I will usually know immediately thanks to my IDE, compiler, automated tests, debugger, or behavior of the program. On this test if I get tricked, I just lose points. In my experience most debugging presents as trial-and-error (a terrible test-taking strategy) or seeing a bug and reasoning at a high level which component of the software is responsible and gradually narrowing it down. Carefully reading through lines of code is usually the last step, unless I've got an especially elusive bug. > And the variable naming quip... are you serious? One of the worst mistakes you can make when trying to read code for understanding is to rely on documentation layers like comments and variable names. Those things lie. Read the code. I'm not sure what sorts of code you're reading but this opinion seems extreme. Do you really just wholly ignore comments and variable names? I have encountered inaccurate examples of both but I have never thought to distrust them by default. As far as I recall this has not caused me serious issues while debugging.