Future Flickr Account?
Photo credit: chrstphre
A sarcastic look at what might happen to Flickr if the Microsoft/Yahoo! deal goes through. More here.
Cheating
I was reminded today of an amusing incident we had when we first started testing prospective employees back at Interesource. I wrote the test and then had a couple of my colleagues check it for usefulness and correctness. All seemed good, so we sent it to one of our recruitment consultants who promised to make sure that his candidates would not have access to any books or the internet while they answered the test.
We got the first few completed tests back pretty quickly and started marking them, only to discover what we thought were obvious signs of the candidate cheating. We asked the agent just to make sure, and he assured us that the candidates had not had access to any materials that they could have used to cheat on the test.
We didn’t buy it. Why? One of the candidates had submitted answers in a Word document that contained elaborately formatted and coloured code. Exactly the same colouring and formatting as if it had been copied from Visual Studio and then pasted into Word in fact. Either this guy had cheated, or he was used to wasting a lot of time while coding. We leaned towards the former and didn’t deal with his agent again.
After that, we decided to have candidates come in to the office to complete the test with a pen and paper. Even this wasn’t foolproof though.
One time, a candidate came in and I gave him the test paper. He finished very quickly - which was a surprise - and I started marking the test. He was doing really well and I’d basically decided that we should give him an interview. And then I noticed that he’d made a very basic mistake in one of the answers. Exactly the same mistake that I had made when I was drawing up the model answers. He’d taken the question paper with him, so I couldn’t be certain, but I was fairly sure that I’d given him a print out of the questions and model answers instead of just the questions.
I carried on marking the test and, sure enough, he’d literally copied out everything from the paper and walked away with it to cover his tracks. The best anyone did on the test without cheating was about 50% - it was quite hard and very varied. We didn’t expect anyone to get 100% or anything close to it, really. We certainly didn’t expect them to get everything except a really simple array iterator question right.
The bottom line was that although both candidates probably thought we would think they were pretty smart, they weren’t actually smart enough to cheat without getting caught. And they were therefore not smart enough for us to employ…
