Sakai/IMS had two great students (Kathleen/Jordi) and one student who did not complete the project – this is pretty typical success rate for Google Summer of Code. Leslie Hawthorn – our fearless SOC leader asked the list of mentors how we could better deal with students who did not make the cut by the end of the program. Here is a simplified version of my note to Leslie and the list.

Leslie – A couple of comments
(a) Keep the mentor ratio to 1:1 – this was a recommendation – I just did not believe it – but in retrospect – I do believe it. Mentor hours are more precious and limited than I thought in the middle of a busy and fun summer. Even for us faculty with summers “off”.
(b) I needed to be much more clear about the SOC being a full-time job for the student.
(c) There is too little time in the summer to do on-the-job training for basic skills. Mentoring needs to be mentoring – not one-on-one tutoring of programming skills.
I wrote an entrance exam for the students but chose *not* to give my “entrance exam” because I was afraid that skilled students would not bother applying to my project because other projects did not have an entrance exam.
Here is my exam (never given)
http://www.dr-chuck.com/soc2008/
Here is my recommendation: Lets come up with a couple of “pre-exams” – (look at mine for an example) and use them across SOC. We could make 10 or so exams – PHP, C, C++, Javascript, etc etc. Make the exams have genuine activities like “check xyz out from SVN and compile it”. Make it so students take these exams as part of their application process – and if they pass them – SOC gives them a “Java skillz inside” indicator. This way we all know which students have some skills and have taken the initiative to take a few hours and demonstrate those skills – these “certified students” would naturally have an advantage when applying to whichever project they applied to.
It would also allow LH and crew to better get a sense of which students were serious and which had real skillz as well.
The problem is that if I byte the bullet and do the exam – then I may end up with zero students as they look for easier doors to try. If this is a SOC-wide thing then all projects benefit and all projects and students come at this on equal footing.
We might want to get together and work up these exams as a community – If GSOC could not scare up the resources to write the software to track the certification process – perhaps a few of us could write an App Engine app to do it – hey it is already integrated with Google accounts…
Thinking out loud.