Help Us Write Assessment Questions

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We have been asking people the questions below before the start of a bootcamp in order to get a handle on how much they already know. As part of evaluating the current round of work, we'd like to expand the list a little, and touch on a few more topics. Our rough categorization of how much someone should know about various things is in the competence matrix; ideally, we want another 3-4 questions on each topic. Our criteria are:

• The command or concept should make sense on its own.
• It should be fairly representative of the topic (that is, not an obscure edge case).

Assessing impact may be the most important thing we do in this round of Software Carpentry, so please send us suggestions by email, or add comments to this post.

1. Do you understand the following Unix shell commands well enough to explain them to someone else?
   • ls data/*.txt
   • find ~ -name '*.py' -print
2. Do you understand the following Subversion commands well enough to explain them to someone else?
   • svn update
   • svn diff -r 1723
3. Do you understand the following Python statements well enough to explain them to someone else?
   • {'east' : 5, 'west' : 11}
   • __init__(self, *args)
4. Do you understand the following testing concepts well enough to explain them to someone else?
   • fixture
   • mock object
5. Do you understand the following Make terms and commands well enough to explain them to someone else?
   • dependency
   • cp $< $@
6. Do you understand the following SQL terms and commands well enough to explain them to someone else?
   • select * from data where data.left < data.right;
   • inner join