How Codeassess helped Coders Guild, Philippines set up a Coder Rating Systemt

Client Overview & Background

Coders Guild is an educational testing service located in the Philippines that specializes in providing industry-aligned, skills-based assessments that identify the most talented entry-level programmers to match them with the best employers of programmers throughout the world. The company creates a verified pool of certified programmers for the Philippines software industry.

Founded by Joey Gurango, the aim of Coders Guild is to grow the software industry in the Philippines by increasing the number of programmers amongst the population.

Over the years, China Select has been able to develop lasting partnerships with various international test publishers as well as the domestic and global companies.

How Coders Guild use Coding Tests

Philippine Programmers Rating (PPR)

Coders Guild used the Codeassess platform to create the Philippine Programmers Rating (PPR) for assessing the real world readiness of software engineers.

The PPR is an assessment system consisting of coding assessments that present common programming problems in a true software development environment where automated testing tools are used to detect flaws in the submitted solutions. It is used to not only measure programming knowledge, but also the programming talent and skill.

The three different levels of exams provided are:

• The Aspirant-Level
• Strong online proctoring via webcam and behavior tracking
• The Student-Level
• The Entry-Level

The Aspirant-Level exam requires no programming knowledge or experience and is used to indicate whether the examinee has the required talent to excel in a programming career.

The Student-Level exam determines whether the examinee has the required basic skill in computer software and programming.

The Entry-Level exam is administered to determine whether the examinee has the required skill to excel as a junior programmer in the Philippine software industry.

Philippine Programming Challenge

Coders Guild also runs an annual competition that aims to identify the most talented entry-level programmers in the country, by utilizing Entry Level PPR assessment exams. 2019 was the 5th year running this competition to identify the most talented entry-level programmers in the country. The programming challenge required a robust assessment system that could handle over 500 concurrent testing sessions.

Solution –

Following aspects of the solution were important to Coders Guild:

1. A completely white labeled solution - Using Coders Guild branding and design

2. Low bandwidth design – As the students often used low bandwidth networks

3. Possibility of translation

4. Ability to conduct several hundred concurrent assessments

5. Providing problems for different entry level students would be designed to verify the working skills of the candidates

6. Utilizing the Hackathon feature on Codeassess for running the competition

7. Ability of testing the code quality

Coders Guild identified 9 languages which were most widely used within the student programmer community.

• C
• C++
• Visual Basic .net
• C#
• Java
• Python
• Pascal
• Perl
• HTML/ CSS

Problems were specially created for each language based on the Aspirant, Student and Entry levels. The problems were tested on the students during the creation phase to assess difficulty and appropriate skills being assessed.

Results & Benefits

The Codeassess team fully understood the requirements of Coders Guild and created a solution that was designed to perfectly match these needs. As a result, Coders Guild could rely on the Codeassess coding assessment platform to ensure that their tests and certifications were earned and comprised of industry-relevant content. The testing platform was used at high volumes to assess the coding abilities of vast pools of students.

The programmer rating is a huge on-going success and has led the Philippines Programmer Rating to become an industry acceptable certification through which candidates are made available to the industry.

The Philippines programming challenge is a popular annual competition and attracts hundreds of participants, with a first place prize of P50, 000.