Are On-Line Skills Assessments Worthwhile?

Dagum writes: "A couple of weeks ago, I applied to expertcity.com to try making a couple of extra bucks. Since I have never gotten around to taking any certification tests in any technical areas, they directed me to brainbench.com to take a couple of free tests in a couple of choice categories. The tests are adaptive, and they are usually 40 questions each. Since then, mostly for curiosity, I've racked up about 27 of them, the titles of at least ten of which actually would make me sound intelligent. Barring the usual griping over 'paper certifications' versus real-world experience, I am curious if any other people have tried any of these tests, if anyone can compare their testing experiences with these tests, if anyone has used other free skills assessment tools on the Web, and the general impressions of other participants."

Comments

you cheat at work dont you? ;)

[Courier9]

run into a wall on a problem at work, and you dont just go onto problem B right away, you hit your deja, google etc etc, and if push comes shove, a cow-orker

Re:Could be very useful for interviewers!

[StandardDeviant]

Be wary of places that don't have very good quesion design. E.g. if you're looking for a web perl coder having the test ask them what <<= does isn't that useful, and questions that rely on the coder knowing bad coding habits are ones that are really inadvisable (e.g. obscure defualt settings and values that any wise employer would not want in their codebase). And yes, I thought Brainbench's perl test was a little suboptimal in this regard. :-)

Further, allow them to have whatever reference material they want and access to the programming environment they'll be using (could be as simple as an xterm). You're trying to see how well they will do on the job, so you need to try to replicate the job's conditions.

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I've played with them . . .

[acceleriter]

. . . the Brainbench exams don't seem bad, but there's no test environment control and I wouldn't expect anyone for a minute to believe they meant anything. I think they're useful for self-assessment, though, and don't do any harm, so long as they aren't mentioned on a resume :).

acceleriter, Certified Master Windows 98 Administrator :)

Bah!

[llzackll]

These tests are biased toward the literate.

Could be very useful for interviewers!

[kamzik]

I have to interview applicants for a job often. And it is important to find out what are technical skills of the person. I think some sort of test (theoretical / practical) is the best way how to find out these things. I'm thinking about Brainbench now - maybe I will pickup couple tests from Brainbench which match the job requirements (they are different for each position) and I'll let the applicant pass them as part of the interview. The connections would be allowed only to Brainbench site so the person couldn't cheat. This will be very useful for me.

And of course it is good for self-assessment... Generaly I like it - I'm glad to know about Brainbench.

Kamzik