Pre-Assessment Results

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Of the 29 people who responded to a brief questionnaire before a recent bootcamp, we have:

They describe their current expertise as:

Here's how they thought they could do on some simple tasks:

1. Write a short program to read a file containing columns of numbers separated by commas, average the non-negative values in the second and fifth columns, and print the results.

   11	could do it easily
   15	could probably struggle through
   3	wouldn't know where to start

2. In a directory with 1000 text files, create a list of all files that contain the word "Drosophila", and redirect the output to a file called results.txt.

   12	could do it easily
   10	could struggle through
   7	wouldn't know where to start

3. Check out a working copy of a project from version control, add a file called paper.txt, and commit the change.

   3	could do it easily
   4	could struggle through
   22	wouldn't know where to start

4. A tab-delimited file has two columns: the date, and the highest temperature on that day. Produce a graph showing the average highest temperature for each month.

   19	could do it easily
   0	could struggle through
   10	wouldn't know where to start