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If I saw that quiz at a potential employer I would cross them off my list; I don't need work that badly.

Here are a few of the specific issues:

  • "What does Perl represents?" is not proper English. You intend to be asking "What does Perl represent?", but that only corrects how the question is worded. But to imply that Perl must represent something as an acronym is fallacious. It has been ascribed several meanings, but only retrospectively. It doesn't necessarily have to stand for anything.
  • "Who is the founder of Perl?" is poorly worded. Larry Wall didn't found Perl, he wrote Perl. He's its original author. He now takes on a different role, while others maintain and contribute to the project.
  • "What CPAN means?" is improper English. You intend to ask "What do the letters in CPAN stand for?"
  • When I see "Diff b/w chop and chomp" I think "black and white" (like old televisions), not "between." And you're authoring a quiz. Please no home-brewed abbreviations. "What is the difference between chop and chomp?" And the correct answer is not sufficiently accurate.
  • Don't confuse the issue by using "unlink($file)", just ask "Which function deletes a file?", with "unlink" as the correct answer.
  • If you're going to use the wikipedia definition of autovivification maybe it should be attributed.
  • The correct answer on the shebang question is poorly written. There is no verb. It should start with "It is..."
  • Who cares which is the latest stable version of Perl? And are you prepared to update that question every time a new version of Perl is released? Furthermore, the latest stable version may not be available on all operating systems at the same time, so perhaps it should be qualified as "currently released.", or better, you should come up with a real question that actually matters and doesn't change frequently.
  • I've been checking what Perl version I have available to me with the command line "perl -v" for years, so if that's not the right answer I guess I've been getting bad information for years. I've never used $] from the command line, and can't imagine why I would. The question is also not a complete sentence; it lacks a verb. If your intent is to output only the Perl version and nothing more, reword the question to say "Which of the following one liners will output the Perl version number, and nothing more?
  • Maybe you mean to ask, "What is a JAPH?" (which seems like a really lousy "Perl skillz" question). And your "correct" answer is wrong. merlyn coined the phrase, and it's spelled, "Just another Perl hacker,"
  • Should be: "Which of the following is a valid Perl comment?"
  • "Which of the following sigils precedes an identifier representing a scalar variable?"
  • The next question should be: "Which of the following represent a valid filehandle?" And the answers are all correct because any bareword following Perl's rules for identifiers could be a valid filehandle. If you're asking specifically about the default filehandles, they're all full caps, and the question should ask specifically which are the default filehandles instead. And as someone mentioned, your choice to not also present lexical filehandles is unfortunate.
  • The last question would result in a compiletime error message, so the correct answer isn't even available as an option.

I am sure that a critical eye would find fault with some of my answers here as well, which will lend credence to this next statement. Good test questions and well chosen answer sets take a lot of thought to compose; a concept that too many teachers fail to recognize. I hate multiple choice questions because I'm constantly asking myself, "Do they want the correct answer, or the answer that I suspect they think is correct?" I do think that the questions themselves would do a poor job of distinguishing a good programmer from a bad one.

I have retyped the next paragraph so many times that I've decided to refrain from saying any more on the subject.


Dave


In reply to Re: Perl quiz for beginners by davido
in thread Perl quiz for beginners by jassics

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