[jonathankau]

Hey etc_host,

Thanks for taking a quick peek and sharing your thoughts. I definitely agree that there are issues with many of the questions and that the quiz overall isn't super accurate.

Do you have any recommendations on how to improve this question? Or, are there are subject areas that might make sense instead?

[etc_host]

Just request the meaning of the word itself. Don't load the question with trendy concepts.

  Q. What does idempotence mean?

  A. Validating a sequences of events in a stateless fashion.

As an addendum, a follow-up question might add concrete context to the idea being tested. But context is a bottomless pit, where the default answer "it depends" lurks. That makes this a bad question.

[kazinator]

You're changing the test format here from multiple choice.

If your point is that "multiple choice is bad/written answer good", that's a very general hypothesis in the realm of education; it's not fair to be imposing that on this particular test designer in this particular situation who has chosen to deploy the multiple choice method.

I don't see trendy concepts in the original question. Perhaps the mention of scalability qualifies as trendy in distractor A?

Here is the list of externally referencing noun phrases from the question:

"idempotence", "API design", "rise of distributed systems", "large-scale application", "unreliability of networks", "developers", "robust API", "retry attempt", "designing database schemas", "clients", "multiple, duplicate API requests".

Which of these load the question with trendy concepts? API design, distributed systems, large-scale applications, developers, and duplicate requests existed three decades ago or more.

[etc_host]

Gee, not really. It's still multiple choice.

I simply left out the incorrect responses B, C, D and E, in my version.

Here, let me show you:

  Q. What does idempotence mean?

  A. Validating a sequence of events in a stateless fashion.

  B. A river in Egypt.

  C. Many things to many people.

  D. Anything you want.

  E. I don't know.

There. It's multiple choice now. See how that works?

[kazinator]

Drop the "I don't know". (Unless you're looking for a positive confirmation of who some of the complete morons are, which is mildly insulting.)

Who in their right mind would choose a certified incorrect answer in a multiple choice exam rather than guessing among those which include the correct one?

Anyone who chooses E lacks the cunning to make it in STEM.

[grawprog]

On the other hand. Someone who can admit they don't know the answer to something when they genuinely don't know tends to be more willing to actually go out and learn about that then people who pretend to know the answers to something they don't

Any time i've been working with someone I prefer any time they admit they honestly don't know something then when they lie and pretend and end up fucking shit up.

I kind of took this quiz as a practice quiz for a job interview type scenario than an actual skill test. The questions make more sense if you look at it that way. The question about the web scraper for example seemed like it could have been answered correctly more than one way...