Originally Posted by jkhuggins

Um, no.

Look, I teach computer science at a respected university. I actually understand the questions that were asked. I find it extraordinarily unlikely that the CBP officer actually understood the questions that he forced the detainee to answer, much less understood how to evaluate the answers. As the article states, it seems much more likely that the officer Googled "questions to ask a software engineer" and, when the answers provided by the detainee didn't match the webpage verbatim, declared the detainee had failed the test.

Even if you grant that the exam was legitimate (which it wasn't), how do you expect someone to perform on a technical exam when they've been awake for 24 hours on an airplane, then accused of lying to obtain their visa, then told to take an incredibly vague exam under the threat of deportation? Sheesh, my students have problems with these sorts of questions even when they're awake and have weeks to prepare for them.

If you're going to question someone's expertise, you'd better have expertise at least as great as the person you're questioning. CBP gets no pass on this one.