Just a note, there is a followup paper to "The Camel Has Two Humps". From the abstract:
Two years ago we appeared to have discovered an exciting and enigmatic new predictor of success in a first programming course. We now report that after six experiments, involving more than 500 students at six institutions in three countries, the predictive effect of our test has failed to live up to that early promise.
Also, assuming this were not the case, it's hardly clear that searching for magic programming gear is a commons problem. Why couldn't Google/Facebook administer the simple tests and keep the results secret?
The new paper didn't say that the problem wasn't correct, just that their original solution (test) didn't work out. It's true that it seems to be hard to come up with a reliable test for this sort of thing, but that doesn't mean that it's impossible.
Two years ago we appeared to have discovered an exciting and enigmatic new predictor of success in a first programming course. We now report that after six experiments, involving more than 500 students at six institutions in three countries, the predictive effect of our test has failed to live up to that early promise.
http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper3.pdf
Also, assuming this were not the case, it's hardly clear that searching for magic programming gear is a commons problem. Why couldn't Google/Facebook administer the simple tests and keep the results secret?
I forgot, they already try to do this, but it doesn't give them enough applicants: http://www.mentalfloss.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/Google... http://www.facebook.com/careers/puzzles.php
Or why couldn't a trusted third party, like Microsoft, Cisco or Red had charge journalism majors/unemployed adults to take the test?
I forgot, they already try to do this, but they just don't do a very good job and their tests have little predictive power: https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/community/certifications/c... http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/mcse.a... http://www.redhat.com/certification/rhce/