We have been asking people the questions below before the start of a boot camp 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.
Do you understand the following Unix shell commands well enough to explain them to someone else?
ls data/*.txt
find ~ -name '*.py' -print
Do you understand the following Subversion commands well enough to explain them to someone else?
svn update
svn diff -r 1723
Do you understand the following Python statements well enough to explain them to someone else?
{'east' : 5, 'west' : 11}
__init__(self, *args)
Do you understand the following testing concepts well enough to explain them to someone else?
fixture
mock object
Do you understand the following Make terms and commands well enough to explain them to someone else?
dependency
cp $< $@
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
Originally posted 2012-03-05 by Greg Wilson in Assessment.