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How about making the person taking the certification create working, readable programs, and have them submit their answers electronically. Like how programming
by bfung 17y ago
How about making the person taking the certification create working, readable programs, and have them submit their answers electronically. Like how programming assignments were in college, except without the rife copying between the participants. I think this test would weed out many people from the very beginning.
- gdp 17y agoYou're talking about programming and creating programs. That would be a really, really useless certification.
- bfung 17y agoThat would be a really, really useless certification. Please explain? The ancestor post by huhtenberg says he obtained certification for Visual Basic although he never wrote a single line of it before. My suggestion for the certification process is to actually use the skill at question, and using that as a basis for obtaining the paper that says "Yes, I can do this proficiently", where the skill in question is software development, not memorizing book knowledge. Why not test software development by making the test taker develop software?
- gdp 17y agoBecause there is no objective measure for "quality" within an individual implementation within a language. The best we can hope for is some guarantee that people know what the tools and techniques available to them are, and that they know the factors that influence software quality. That would be more valuable than being language certified.
- huhtenberg 17y agoBack when I worked for a large networking hardware company, we tried it a couple of times. It didn't work, people cheat. We asked to implement a splay tree container in C. Got back clean and working code, followed up with phone interviews, then brought these guys in (from another city) only to discover they didn't know what the offsetof() was. Even though it was used in the code they have submitted.