Oddur Magnusson

Object reference not set to an instance of a human being

AskYourSelf.Net

While studying for my first .net exam I decided it would be a good idea to try take some demo exams and find out how I was doing. I found some assessments on Microsoft.com but those are not good at all.

So I got the idea of a community driven website that allows people to take demo exams that are dynamically created by community submitted questions. All it would need is a simple asp.net application and a active community to submit test questions. Questions would be categorized by exam so I could for example ask for questions that are only for a certain exam. Features that could be added later would be user registration and having a history of test-exams and a scoring system.

I'd be willing to donate hosting and bandwidth for such a site  (w2k3, mssql, xeon, 10mbits fiber, e.t.c) and I think it make a nice personal side-project. What do you guys think about this idea ? Would anybody submit demo questions, or would this be a failure ?

As you can see, I already thought up a domain for the site ;)

Posted: Jan 08 2004, 07:24 PM by oddurmag | with 4 comment(s)
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Comments

Roy Osherove said:

Sounds like a great idea!
I'd be happy to help in any way.
# January 8, 2004 3:19 PM

Jonathan Cogley said:

What about just using a Wiki (like FlexWiki) and letting the community build the questions and answers?
# January 8, 2004 5:05 PM

Josh said:

I'm not sure how the other "demo" test companies handle it, but I wonder if you have to worry about liability. Microsoft might not like it if people that took actual tests started posting those test questions (I believe you agree to an NDA when you take an MCP test) on your website. Is it your responsibility to determine which questions are "original" and which are ripped from actual tests? I don't know the answer, just raising the question.

It's a great idea, hope it works.
# January 8, 2004 6:46 PM

Leon Bambrick said:

Hate to pour cold water on your enthusiasm but...

This is definitely a great idea and in a perfect world it would produce a very useful and handy site.

However, the NDA issues would kill it for sure. if you personally check submitted questions you might be able to avoid NDA problems. But having done that the site would be less useful, less performant and take up more of your time - and some NDA violations could still slip through, which would bring the wrath of MS upon you.

sounds like you'd rather code an application than get on with the work of actually studying. So go on, stop procrastinating and start studying...

cheers
# January 8, 2004 7:19 PM
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