oDesk's free skill tests.

oDesk has a broad category of skill tests they offer to providers for free. Free is the reason I took one of oDesk's skill tests, and not-free is the reason I still haven't gotten an ExpertRating for my RentACoder resume'.

It's actually a good way to show your qualifications if you don't have any experience under your belt. Although I haven't quite gotten an oDesk job yet (I've decided to low-ball everyone and start negotiating for $10/hr just to get some time under my belt), people seem very interested -- from what they say -- at my test scores when they talk to me.

The tests are a useful gauge, I guess, but some of them need to be vetted more thoroughly. For instance, the DotNet Fundamentals test actually had an api question in there. Yeah. Now, I don't know about you, but I normally read the documentation / intellisense comments on any method or class before I actually used it, but here they seemed to assume I memorized all of the .NET BCL by heart.

I, uh, didn't.

In another test -- I think it was 'C# Programming' -- there were a handful of api questions in there as well. It was a bizarre question in particular, but I don't think I'm allowed to discuss it, but here's the gist of it:

"Class X does not have the following method:

..."

Yeah. That was kind of, mmm, dumb. I think I got it right because I had been using that class type just yesterday, but still, it's a completely irrelevant question to ask.

Still, they're free tests. If they're vetted once or twice by some independent sources all of the irrelevant questions can be culled from those categories and it will make for a better overall measure of someone's competency. I'd rather take a free test with a couple of flaws than pay for the very same.

tags: odesk