| First off, I like the idea. Tech interviews are so broken that I'm happy to see folks trying to make things better. I just started clicking through this and stopped at question 7: "How many bits are in 8 bytes?" I don't know if this is intentional or not, but this is an ambiguous question. I suspect the "right" answer is the one that assumes 8 bits in an byte, but historically that assumption is not always true, e.g. lots of IETF RFCs refer to "octets" rather than "bytes" to avoid the confusion. I bring this up not to quibble about historical architectures, but to address another item I recall from my SAT/ACT taking days--getting into the head of the question writer. When I saw this question I thought, "Are they looking for the current/common interpretation, or do they expect me to know mostly useless trivia about the history of the definition of byte?" Perhaps I'm overthinking it. I probably am. But for that specific question, the answer is "it depends." And based on that, there is no 100% correct answer offered, so I'm left choosing the next best answer, which is probably the one most folks would select anyway. Was this intentional? Again, it's been a long time since I've taken these types of tests. |
We try to solve this with the standard "choose the BEST answer". We also do post-mortems and analyze the responses to disqualify or discount bad questions.
These are issues the CSPA Technical Steering Committee, which is responsible for the exam content, will deal with, in collaboration with our research advisor: https://cspa.io/about/team