BlackBeltFactory's News

A student team from Belgium, has written objectives for an HTML and a CSS exam. Xavier Bouquiaux put them on-line.

• HTML
• CSS

These exams are not supposed to be basic and they are waiting for your great questions.

Edit: The survey is over. Links are not available anymore.

We are proceding with phase 2 of our Surveys. After the initial one-to-one interviews, we are now launching a quantitative survey, again related to the same two topics:

1. Should the JavaBlackBelt Community be offered the possibility to contribute financially in order to take exams, as an alternative to paying with contribution points?
2. Should JavaBlackBelt expand its current services with "Distant Learning" , and how?

We would appreciate your opinion by taking either or both surveys which are available on these URL:

1. Direct access to Pay for contribution points survey.
2. Direct access to Distant learning survey.

In return you will earn some contribution points (10 points for each survey).
Of course you can take both survey, once only.

We will share the conclusions of this survey in January 2009.

Thomas, from Sydney, prepared objectives for CVS Exams. Mateusz, from Poland/Australia put them online.

There are currently five new exams available:

• CVS Concept
• CVS Usage - command line
• CVS Usage - Eclipse plugin
• CVS Usage - TortoiseSVN
• CVS Usage - WinCVS

Do you have a question that every CVS should now the answer for? Share it: author a question!

John, from Belgium, has released a little exam about the usage of JavaBlackBelt platform and about the quality of authored questions.

It should help contributors in their quest for quality:

• Voters, to better distinguish good from bad questions
• Exam takers, to report problems more often
• Question authors, to avoid beginner's mistakes

Do you have an example in mind of typical mistake in questions that you see repeated on this site? Share it: author a question in this new exam!

We go to Sweden, at the Øredev conference (November 17-21) where we will run the JavaBlackBelt challenge.

One of you has the possibility to join us for free!

View the Øredev auction.

After just 1 week, we already have enough questions for the Groovy - Basic exam so that it is now in beta! It needs your votes to get questions released. Take a beta test today!

This new version of JavaBlackBelt includes deep changes in the moderation process and in the user interface for contributing to questions.

The goal of these changes is to improve the exams quality. It's easier to contribute. It's easier to move too hard questions to other exams (or to the freezer). Questions have to be "quickly" accepted/released, else they get frozen (average questions don't remain beta forever anymore). It's easy to report copy/paste/execute style questions and tricky questions, which are bad practices.

These changes are essentially visible from the now highly ajaxified "question listing". You can access it from any exam (by listing the beta questions, for example). Most people will face it a the end of their exam in their result page. It will be an ideal time for them to contribute: improve questions, report problems and vote.

Corporate users benefit these changes as well, because now they can contribute to community exams. Corporate users (admins) can also create their own private (intra-company) exams, to which employees of the company can contribute.

Finally, we have fixed a few bugs and introduced a few others ;-)

You are welcome to discuss and ask questions about this new version on the forum.