Adapt Pluralsight IQ Questions about 30-seconds-of-interviews

[fejes713]

Sure, I will take a look at it during the weekend. I have some questions too from various conferences. Feel free to add them if you have time and patience 😄

[theodesp]

I suppose some questions are not. But others with code examples could be. For example, there are some questions that have specific code snippets and they could be referenced.

[skatcat31]

https://www.pluralsight.com/terms

Any source code is their own property. However anything related to the idea of CS as a whole or related to a specific in built feature (recreate this boolean, how do you delete a Javascript property on an Object, what happens when you call a var before it's assigned versus when you call a let when it's assigned) cannot be licensed solely to plural sight as they would be specifically towards the original language copyright holder or to the public domain(educational purposes) and then their public licenses would apply instead, which for ECMAScript is open source, and for Computer Science is Public Domain. It gets into much stickier ground with licensed software like Adobe products or the like.

Questions that are specific problem solving questions we would NOT be able to replicate as the code in those questions are property of Pluralsight unless previous publicly accessible arts can be defined.

To be specifically honest though it'd be best to contact Pluralsight for permission on any questions that are not so generic as to be considered previous art/public knowledge.

More than anything what is really protected is the recreation of their theme, interaction design and layering, paths, video content, lesson plans, etc. that they themselves would have had to have made in house. Those a sole property and license materials of Pluralsight.

So it'd be a question by question basis for whether or not copying it for educational purposes would be allowed. We may want to quantify what exactly we want to copy, which questions, asses if they can be considered previous art, and then adapt them with explanations. Any questions we would want to explain that would be considered Pluralsight content we would need permissions for, and a direct attribution to Pluralsight's site(possibly with tracking so they know it came from the license grantee).

So to be safe, we'd want to check on anything more advanced than general knowledge of open source languages. If we really want to be safe, we'd contact them about using any questions that appear on their site that we are referencing.

Remember licensing is sticky and tricky. You can't copyright anything publicly available as a previous art, but you can copyright the specific way you did it as long as the intent was not to take away from the previous art holder(s). The term 'similar to, but significantly different' is an actual legal term after all.

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TL;DR:

We might want to contact Pluralsight about adding them as credit for any questions we adapt, and which questions would be off limits to adapt for an explanation if we feel it can't be considered a question that would be available in the Public Domain for educational purposes.

[Chalarangelo]

Pluralsight is quite cool, I took some tests in it and the questions are pretty interesting. We should look into this.

[fejes713]

@flxwu I've taken tests. Most of these questions are multiple choice with really little explanation. However, there are few good ones so we can add them over the weekend.

[skatcat31]

I went through the JS test at least... I'm not certain I like a few of their questions(they're kind of outdated), but a lot of them would be great to adapt

[skatcat31]

Is there a link to the questions in question?

[fejes713]

If you're thinking about mentioned ones, just register here I guess: https://app.pluralsight.com/paths/skills

[fejes713]

I have added Pluralsight questions to the new branch pluralsight-questions. Those are just questions with no answers. We can slowly start adding answers to them, no rush.

Those questions can be answered in one or two sentences but I would like to keep answers rich like we do in the rest of the project so feel free to mention relevant information in each answer.

Here's the branch: https://github.com/fejes713/30-seconds-of-interviews/tree/pluralsight-questions

[skatcat31]

I think this might be better tackled the same way it was with Chalarangelo/30-seconds-of-code#100

[fejes713]

@skatcat31 You're right. I will try to add an issue later today! Thanks

[theodesp]

I write questions for Pluralsight IQ and we have to bear in mind that its intellectual property of Pluralsight and the authors that make them and we should not copy them in any way unless we ask for permission. There is a lot of time to prepare those questions so there should be only newly created ones.

[fejes713]

Thanks for letting us know about it @theodesp. However, I am not so sure about that statement.

How could question "How do you remove a property from an object?" be a legal property of Pluralsight?

Those are questions that are encountered in every other interview. @skatcat31 @Chalarangelo Could you please revisit this (as well as the rest of the core team)?