> Software Engineering is good right now because anyone, absolutely anyone, can dive in.
Yes, I wholeheartedly agree! CSPA actually bolsters this because there are no eligibility requirements to take the test. We believe there are a ton of great engineers WITHOUT a college degree and we want to surface them.
We're making it MORE accessible, not less. There's no real barrier to taking the CSPA, except the time commitment. Just register and take it.
Long term, we hope to replace as much of the onsite as possible. But we do acknowledge we can never fully replace it.
Re: GAN, we tried including ML in the Core exam, but have actually since removed ML since it wasn't working. We may introduce this as part of an ML specific subject test.
If you want to get involved designing questions, please consider applying to the TSC for next term: https://cspa.io/tsc/apply.
Some of the multiple choice questions are fact-based and just require a Google search -- this is intentional, since proper Googling skills are still needed for the job :)
Problem solving questions are better formatted as open-response essay questions, which we do have.
We are debating having a Core general exam, and separate per-subject tests, similar to SAT I vs SAT II.
We try to solve this with the standard "choose the BEST answer". We also do post-mortems and analyze the responses to disqualify or discount bad questions.
These are issues the CSPA Technical Steering Committee, which is responsible for the exam content, will deal with, in collaboration with our research advisor: https://cspa.io/about/team
(1) When we retire old exam questions, we will make them available for practice. We're working on creating more study materials! I can't promise anything before April though.
(2) Ah the 440 FE is a typo. We updated the scoring algorithm a few months back and didn't update those examples. Most people try completing all 6 subject sections. It's up to you, but we do discourage optimizing this kind of test taking strategy, and "teaching to the test" ;P
Hi HN!We're James and Angel, the founders of CSPA (https://cspa.io).The Computer Science Proficiency Assessment (CSPA) is a standardized assessment for software engineers. We find software engineers to take our exam, and then share the assessment results with employers, who can then hire these candidates for free.James was the founder of Crunchyroll and oversaw product and engineering. Angel...
Well FWIW, I personally wrote the coding exercise that you enjoyed (http://www.crunchyroll.com/tech-challenge/roaming-math/yourn...). I thought it was a good mix of basic algorithms (tree traversal) as well as some practical knowledge (CURL/http). I'm surprised they are still using the same one :)
You're right, so far most of the test takers are entry-level or changing careers. To accurately assess specialities like ops/IT, we'll need separate, dedicated subject tests (or adaptive tests).
That said, no one has yet gotten a perfect 1600 :) . The highest is something like 1380.
Adaptive testing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computerized_adaptive_testing) is something we're looking into, and would be extremely interesting (and challenging!) to build.
Adaptive scoring algorithms and ways to let employers create custom projections of our multidimensional data is something we're thinking about. If you have ideas on how to build this, I'd love to hear them! [email protected]
We're constantly improving the CSPA questions, and our latest iteration has quite a few changes. Some of the examples you mentioned assess how detail-oriented the candidates are. We're interested in how this data correlates with how bug-prone someone is.
That said, we trimmed some of those down in our latest version and replaced it with more substantial questions.
- james
Crunchyroll's interview process definitely was not consistent, which is why I spent my final two years there trying to improve our processes. I learned a lot from it, and that's why we're doing CSPA :)
- James Lin ([email protected])