As part of our application process we want prospective college interns to complete an assignment on their own - either programming or analytical - to give us something tangible to evaluate such as code or a flowchart. I have two ideas for these assignments, one programming and one analytical, I am interested in gathering feedback about these.

Programming Assignment

Generate an a month's calendar for a given date. The first row should indicate the days of the week (e.g. Sunday - Saturday). Each subsequent row should contain a week's days. The date supplied should be highlighted (e.g. bolded).

I am thinking we'll probably proscribe the output format even more strictly - probably down to what the HTML source should look like including CSS classes. Thinking is this forces answerers to actually do some work if they merely copy a solution from the internet.

Analytical Assignment

Diagram or describe in prose a system for managing a set of traffic lights for traffic at a four way intersection. Each direction (i.e. North, South, East and West) has two lanes (i.e. right and left). The left lane is turn only and has green arrow light to indicate right of way. The system is able to detect if lanes have cars in them and change the lights accordingly.

I would expect a flow chart or some prose describing a finite state machine that deals with each contingency. This would hopefully provide some indication of the applicant's ability to reason through a logic problem of sorts and articulate an approach for solving.

Areas Seeking Feedback

1. Is it unreasonable to ask this of applicants? If not, is it better to request before or after a phone screen?
2. Are these questions too hard or easy for a collegiate audience?
3. Any suggestions for alternate questions?
4. Do these seem like good tools for analyzing people who would part of a software development life cycle?
5. Programming language suggestions - I'm thinking Java, Python and/or C# (we're actually a ColdFusion shop).