Tek.Xam: Huh?
While researching a possible '08 presidential candidate, Mark Warner at OnTheIssues.net, I saw he supported something called "Tek.Xam - a standard test for technology employment." I wondered what this was so I searched and found tekxam.com. I laughed a little as I clicked through each of the "pages"; every page was actually a huge image, aobut 150KB in size. There's no excuse for this, especially when each page has no more than 5 paragraphs of text.
That was pretty crappy but it got worse when I tried to take the sample quiz. The page was created in ASP but the webserver wasn't IIS (it was Apache) nor was it configured for ASP so you can see all the code. After that chuckle (this is a tech aptitude test website afterall) I decided to check out the code on the grading page.
The code was a trip! While the entire page is pure ASP, the ASP engine was called to stop and start 5 times and there was also some non-sensical debugging commands. Keeping track of the correct answers was alright (though since q1 & so on were only used once, they could have just been incorporated into the if statements without prior variable assignment) but then I saw this....<%if (correctanswers=>0) and (correctanswers<1) then Response.Redirect "result-0.htm" end if if (correctanswers=>1) and (correctanswers<2) then Response.Redirect "result-1.htm" end if and so on...What kind of logic is that? And has this person never heard of elseif? I just wonder, could this page have been coded any worse?