Playground quiz questions

Question

I’m genuinely concerned about this one.
I’m somewhat a beginner coder (JS, HTML, css, etc) and everyday I feel more confident in my coding...until I use the playground to challenge other people and the quiz questions are crazy difficult or just plain ridiculous, especially for the time limit given. I study every single day trying to get better, reading books, writing my own code, I feel like I’m progressing in leaps and bounds...

and then I do those challenges and see things that make my head spin and make me wonder if I’m even on the right track. Any else feel this way or is it just me? Am I just bad at programming or reading JavaScript? Do I just need to practice more?
Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I wouldn't call the quizzes poorly written. It undermines all the effort the admins have put into amending the actually poorly written quizzes which were originally submitted.

That said, it is not a good measure of your programming skills. Not everybody is skilled at quik mafs, and yes, memory plays a huge role in deciphering these cryptic play of code. :>

By chance, did you come across this thread by Igor Makarsky?

https://www.sololearn.com/Discuss/650225/?ref=app

Answer 2

Nah, it's just that some of the quiz questions are poorly written, way to advanced, or on topics that weren't covered in great detail in the course. Don't worry, you're not the only one. Most people just memorize the quiz questions anyway, hence the "storming". If you really want to test your skills, try completing some online challenges, or the assignments here in SL. Good luck, and keep up the coding m8! 😊

Answer 3

Hatsy Rei Agreed - not all of the questions are poorly written, but definitely some of them are, and they are usually the ones that pop up for beginners. (It seems here in SL that beginners get harder challenges than higher levels, from my personal experience. I don't know if that's legit or not, but just what I've been observing.) The SL team has put huge efforts into making the quizzes better, as I've seen some of what they have to deal with, so, yeah, not knocking that at all. Cheers bro.

Answer 4

While I do very much appreciate the diversity in the SoloLearn community, I find some (certainly not all) of the challenge questions difficult to read (even as a native English speaker). They are just worded funny. That being said, I wouldn't change how the challenge questions are sourced from the SoloLearn community at large. Just one of our nifty little quirks. 🤓

Challenges are supposed to be challenging, right? 😉 Some of the questions are incredibly nuanced. I find that I've gotten along just fine in the programming world without memorizing the answers to many of the challenge questions. Don't sweat it. 😎

Answer 5

Challenges that require complex calculations are extremely annoying as they are difficult to solve in 30s. 😞

This type of questions cannot help us to be better. It only causes us to get stressed

Answer 6

Thanks for all the great answers guys and gals. I feel much better about all this. You guys are awesome!

Answer 7

I know that feeling :(. JS challenges are too hard, but HTML challenges are too easy ;)

Answer 8

I see the challenges as an extension of the tutorials, because these really only cover the most basic of every topic. There simply is not the room to cover everything if you want to keep the courses from turning into full-fledged language reference books.

So a lot of 'what if's remain. And the challenges are exactly the place to tackle these, to see what happens when you leave the happy 'Hello World' and see what's beyond.

Some of the riddles may not look very real-lifey, but actually sometimes your own code might even turn out messier; and if there's a bug in it - good luck finding it if you never practiced figuring out a mess!

Instead of getting frustrated, thinking 'but I've done the tutorial and all', I recommend to see the challenges more like step 2 after you acquired the basics.

And even if you fail at a riddle, you usually can learn something from it by figuring out the 'why'.