Home> Blog> Pre-Assessment Results

Pre-Assessment Results

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Of the 29 people who responded to a brief questionnaire before a recent bootcamp, we have:

18graduate students
4postdocs
4staff
1faculty member
1general public
1special student

They describe their current expertise as:

1master
10have written a few programs
17have written a little code
1has no programming experience

Here's how they thought they could do on some simple tasks:

  1. Write a short program to read a file containing columns of numbers separated by commas, average the non-negative values in the second and fifth columns, and print the results.
    11could do it easily
    15could probably struggle through
    3wouldn't know where to start
  2. In a directory with 1000 text files, create a list of all files that contain the word "Drosophila", and redirect the output to a file called results.txt.
    12could do it easily
    10could struggle through
    7wouldn't know where to start
  3. Check out a working copy of a project from version control, add a file called paper.txt, and commit the change.
    3could do it easily
    4could struggle through
    22wouldn't know where to start
  4. A tab-delimited file has two columns: the date, and the highest temperature on that day. Produce a graph showing the average highest temperature for each month.
    19could do it easily
    0could struggle through
    10wouldn't know where to start