Of the 29 people who responded to a brief questionnaire before a recent boot camp, we have:
18
graduate students
4
postdocs
4
staff
1
faculty member
1
general public
1
special student
They describe their current expertise as:
1
master
10
have written a few programs
17
have written a little code
1
has no programming experience
Here's how they thought they could do on some simple tasks:
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
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
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
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
Originally posted 2013-04-30 by Greg Wilson in Assessment.