General Skills Test Instructions

Skills Tests are short, timed exams that will have students perform actual coding tasks using their laptop software development environments. A key aim of the Skills Tests is to evaluate whether students can perform core development tasks quickly and correctly. Such skill and efficiency is essential to being an effective software development team member.

The Rules

• No devices, except for your laptop.
• Paper notes are allowed. Having digital notes on your laptop is allowed.
• Closed neighbor.
• No texting/messaging/posting. Searching the web for documentation and existing forum posts is OK.

This is an exam, and violations of the rules will be treated as academic dishonesty.

Preparing Your Development Environment for the Test

Way Before the First Test

You should need to perform these steps only one time before doing the first Skills Test.

• Install and set up the OBS screen-capture software as per these instructions. If OBS doesn’t work on your system, contact the instructor immediately so that a replacement can be found.

• Download the Skills Test repo and initialize the project.

  1. If you have not done so already, you must complete the development environment preparation in Skills Test S1 Running a Rails App.

  2. Open GitHub repo page: https://github.com/memphis-cs/skills-test-comp-7012-2020-01spring. This repo is publicly readable, but you will not be able to push to it.

  3. Change directory to your workspace directory (cd workspace/).

  4. Clone the Skills Test GitHub repo using this command:

      git clone https://github.com/memphis-cs/skills-test-comp-7012-2020-01spring.git
     

     If you have set up key-based authentication for GitHub, you may alternatively use the SSH version of the repo URL.

  5. Change directory to skills-test-comp-7012-2020-01spring (cd skills-test-comp-7012-2020-01spring).

  6. Install the project’s gem dependencies (bundle install).

  7. Install the project’s JavaScript dependencies (yarn install).

  8. Migrate and reset the databases:

      rails db:migrate:reset db:seed
     

Right Before the Start of a Test

• Get ready by cd-ing into your workspace/skills-test-comp-7012-2020-01spring folder.

• Check to make sure your working directory is clean (git status). If it’s not clean, you must make it clean. There are a number of ways to go about this, and the best choice depends on your exact situation. One common approach would simply be to commit all changes (git add -A, git commit -m "...").

• Launch OBS, and get ready to record.

• Launch your web browser, and open https://www.google.com/ in one tab and https://github.com/memphis-cs/skills-test-comp-7012-2020-01spring in another tab.

Finally, refresh the Skills Test GitHub repo page until a the current $TESTID branch becomes available under the Branch: ... dropdown. (Substitute $TESTID with whatever the ID of the current Skills Test is; for example, for the first Skills Test, you would substitute $TESTID with s01.)

When the branch for $TESTID appears in the dropdown, click it to switch to that branch. Once you’ve done that, the README.md file should provide the instructions for the test.

Retry Tests

Certain Skills Tests are Retry Tests. A Retry Test provides a second chance to pass a previously failed test. For example, the Skills Test S3-Retry would cover all the material up to and including S3. If a student had, for example, failed S2 and passed S3, then the student could take S3-Retry. If the student passes the Retry Test, then they will effectively replace their failing S2 grade with a passing grade.

If a student has passed all previous tests already, then the student is not eligible take the Retry Test. (They would have nothing to gain from it anyway.)

A Retry Test can replace only one failing grade, so if a student had failed both S2 and S3, passing the S3-Retry would replace only one of those failing grades.