[unimpressive]

>This is insightful. I've been very ambivalent about it, because I am scared of what happens through regulatory capture. But at this point, I do sometimes wish there were an industry-wide, well recognized exam that covered the paces that you go through when you interview at google, amazon, and small companies that are copying them.

I'm just as worried about regulatory capture as you are, but it might be possible to create a de facto standard exam in this vein just by making a good one and then relying on its merit to make it well known. I mean, fizzbuzz has already reached this status as an easy flunk-out interview question and lots of people take it as a positive test of programming ability. (Which it obviously isn't.)

The basic problem with an 'open exam' in this vein is that it is very easy to copy the work of others. So whatever problems you pick need to be things that are objective enough to be verifiable that someone has solved them but general enough that it won't be something where we all need to worry about whether you pasted your solution in from someones blog.