On 7/21/05, Peter Samuelson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Making NM more of a mentoring+monitoring thing, instead of The Essay > > Test From Hell, would be a Great Thing. It appears that other AMs > > aren't entirely against the idea, either. > > People keep complaining about the Essay Test from Hell, but I guess I > still don't quite see the problem. Who is it that doesn't like it? Is > it AMs that feel it's too much work on top of their other duties to get > to know an applicant's skill level? Is it the competent applicants who > feel it's beneath them? Or is it incompetent applicants who feel > intimidated by all the hard concepts to look up?
I think it's mainly people who know, or can search and then produce the answers, but feel that they are wasting their time on that. Completing the 4 templates takes many many hours, hours that could be spent bugfixing, packaging, writing code, etc. In my case, my P&P questions came in the middle of a BSP, I promptly stopped fixing bugs to answer these questions. In the end, I stole something like 12 hours of the BSP to answer P&P questions... Isn't that like a big big waste? > I guess I'm not actually opposed to the idea of making people *do* all > the things they are currently only *asked* about - I am just curious > about who is clamoring for this, and why. The most interesting and most useful part of the templates is the last one, where you are actually asked to DO things, like fix an RC bug, write a missing manpage, etc. Those are much more useful and interesting things. I think it would be nice to have more tasks and less write-ups. -- Besos, Marga
