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How to let people not contribute while preventing cheating.
At 8:13 AM on Jan 7, 2007, John Rizzo wrote:
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But most people are consumers and we already have so many producers (contributors, who I thank sooo much).
Many people stop using JavaBlackBelt after the yellow belt because they need to contribute (and feel it may be painful, or they would be very bad at it).
When talking with some of our community members at Javapolis last December, an idea came to me: why not have a (strict) exam sequence free of contribution points.
We would identify a sequence of exams. For example:
Users can follow that sequence for free. It means they have a next free exam every time. But they must follow that strict order if they don't have contribution points to spend.
Cheating by creating another user would be difficult. Imagine you are doing the SQL & RDB - Basic. You would have to create another user and make it succeed the 5 previous exams to have a chance to view the questions.
What do you think about this possible change.
Any suggestion ?
John.
4 replies so far (
Post your own)
Re: How to let people not contribute while preventing cheating.
I think this is a great idea. It also protects against people trying to download the question base.Some more scenarios to think about:
1) How would this work if someone had contribution points? For example, suppose I am a new user, earn 3 points and take the SQL Basic exam. Is my next free exam Java SE Basic or JDBC Basic?
2) What happens if I fail? Am I locked out of taking all free exams for two weeks?
3) Obviously, this doesn't protect against people cheating on the first exam. (Not that the current system does.) Just mentioning it in case anyone reading this thinks of an approach that would.
4) Currently, there are two free "no strings attached" exams you can take immediately upon registering. Would this system downgrade that to one free exam right away?
5) How does this work for the more advanced exams? A beginner may well know XML without knowing Servlets for example. (I just picked two exams out of a hat. This relationship applies for almost any exams.) Is the expectation that the person would have to create contributions at that point?
6) Is the expectation that someone would be able to get to the highest belts without making any contributions? From the original contribution point discussions, I recall someone was against this. (I don't remember if it was you.) As in the martial arts, the idea was that people would have to contribute something/help others. This could be easily worked around by making X contribution points a pre-req for certain belts.
(I may have some more comments based on the answers to these.)
Re: How to let people not contribute while preventing cheating.
1) We'd require that the complete sequence has been taken before giving the next free exam.2) When people fail from a few points, they usually have a smaller delay. But yes, if you fail the next exam on the free path, you have to wait or contribute.
4) Yes, we could do an exception there.
5) Yes.
6) Good point. We could limit this feature to 10 or 15 exams. Probably enough for people to start contributing with comments and proposal anyway.
Thank you for your feedback, Jeanne.
Re: How to let people not contribute while preventing cheating.
Hi,I think it is a good idea to let people take tests without contributing. And more generally speaking it is a bad idea to force people to contribute, if they don't want to we get only bad comments/questions.
And I agree with Jeanne that it should not be possible to get a brown/black belt without contributing/helping.
tschuess
Thomas
Re: How to let people not contribute while preventing cheating.
#4 & #6) I agree with your answers. Those sound like good ways to handle the more complex cases.