JavaScript Core Assessment Framework
Aram Shatakhtsyan and Michael Newman
Abstract—At a time when educational resources for masterin g JavaScript are increasingly abundant [1][2][3], when
JavaScript is the most popular programming language [4] and when there are 98,000 [5] open job s in the the US (and
growing) that require familiarity with JavaScript, the need for a well-researched framework dening how to assess JavaScript
skill is greater than ever. This paper proposes such a framework with the aim of enabling direct measure me nt of modern
JavaScript development skill and helping the technical recruitment i ndu str y go beyond resumes in assessing this specic
area of software development.
F
1Introduction
T
he status quo in today’s technical recruiting pro-
cess is to use resume as a proxy for skill, which
leads to biased, inecient recruiting and evaluation
practices. Some forward-looking companies are us-
ing automated assessment tools to create their own
tests, which they send to candidates as the rst step
of the interview process. However, there are two ma-
jor problems with that approach. Firstly, the internal
teams creating these assessments are not experts in
test design, which may lead to creation of tests that
are not EEOC-c omp l ian t, or focus too much on some
skills that might not be as important for the role while
neglecting others that could be critical. Secondly, after
internal teams spend a substantial amount of time
creating these assessments, many of these assessments
are eventually posted online on sites like Glassdoor and
Stack Overow, making th e v al i di ty of the test re su l ts
questionable.
The JavaScript SCA (Special iz ed Coding Assessment)
framework described in this paper can be used to create
standardized tests to measure JavaScr ip t programming
skills and knowledge. The tests are based on research
that ensures they are highly consistent and EEOC-
compliant. In addition, basing the test on a frame-
work allows the SCA to be scaled with a large pool of
questions that adhere to the same guidelines. On each
test administration, questions can be randomly selected
from the pool, reducing the risk that a test-taker gains
an unfair advantage by memorizing the questions in
advance.
The Coding Score obtained from the test is a singular
measure meant to give recruiters, hiring managers and
educators – as well as the test-takers themselves – a
quick view of the test-taker’s skills. It measures each
test taker’s code-writing and debugging skills as well
as knowledge of JavaScript. The test should be admin-
istered in a proctored environment, and the solutions
should be automatically checked for plagiarism.
In the next section we will discuss which topics are cov-
ered and will draw guidelines for creating tasks based
on the framework. After war ds, we will dive deeper
into the reasoning of creating the framework and later
discuss the possible outcomes and sc oring of the test.
More details on how Coding Score is calculated can
be found in the paper for General Codin g Assessment
Framework [6].
2TheFramework
The maximum allowed completion time for the test is
80 minutes. Each test has 4 implementation tasks and
16 multiple choice q u iz questions; in total, there are
20 tasks. Each test contains an implementation task
(requires writing at least 25-40 lines of code, but the
description clearly explains what needs to be done), a
bugxtask(checkingdebuggingabilities),tworecovery
tasks (meant to assess a deeper understanding of the
JavaScript language by enforcing limitations on code
changes), and 16 quiz tasks grouped into 4 categories
by topics, with each topic containing 4 tasks.
2.1 Topics
The test will cover the following 8 topics of JavaScript.