[drcube]

"The current Udacity exams take about 10 hours of coding to complete..."

From the article: " For the first round of exams, programming will not be included."

I don't think you can demonstrate programming competence with a 90 minute multiple choice test, so I'm interested to see how they end up tackling that challenge.

[jkimmel]

I think the idea would be for the Pearson exam to act as a compliment to verify your identity more so than demonstrate coding competence.

While the Udacity exam is the actual in depth proficiency challenge that employers will care about, the Pearson name gives some sort of assurance that this person did indeed pass a difficult coding related exam in a physical setting where we can verify their identity, reducing the likelihood that someone cheated or had someone else complete the Udacity course for them. The actual test questions might ask something like "How would you approach problem x, describe what language you would use and how you might structure a program," or for multiple choice, "Which of these is written using proper Python syntax" etc. If you have to learn enough to pass the Pearson test in the end, you'll still have to put in a large chunk of time, making cheating downright impractical.

End result, this partly addresses one of the fundamental issues with online learning that Sebastin Thrun has talked about before, providing a form of physical identity verification and association with an online student username. Of course, someone could always pull a bait-and-switch in the physical testing center, but that's a whole other ball game.

[mcguire]

"...students wishing to pursue our official credential and be part of our job placement program should also take an additional final exam in a Pearson testing center."

It sounds like the Pearson exams are in addition to the online, coding test.

[Alex3917]

Interesting, it's a little ambiguous as to whether they mean a second final exam or whether they mean in addition to the regular course. Assuming they mean a second final exam though this would be good as a clever checksum just to make sure you are who you say you are and can answer basic questions.

[stfu]

Learning for these kind of tests was always the most pointless tasks in school. It is just the same extreme-memorization, braindumping, completely forgetting about it pattern. But of cause this structure makes any kind of course super scalable.