DSAT test for data science skills soon

Kolkata-headquartered Data Science Foundation (DSF), governed by council members from companies like Viacom18, Microsoft, Business Brio, IIM B, ANZ, Northern Trust, Honeywell, among others, is in advanced stage of discussions with atleast two leading US universities and couple of other premier academic institutes in the world to develop a unique assessment system called DSAT, on the lines of GMAT to help top talents (globally) gauge their technical skill and competence levels in data science, ensuring a fair and transparent evaluation process.

Moves are afoot to turn it into a globally accepted assessment system. The assessment will be strongly aligned with Nasscom Data Science curriculum pack (QPs) and will also be in accordance with ISO WG9 (Big Data Analytics working group) and SC42 (artificial intelligence sub-committee) anyways, said Gautam Banerjee, President DSF. DSF will be the independent governing body for building, deploying and constantly upgrading this intervention.

“For a practitioner, taking this test would help them to understand the subject in totality and also enable them to reflect on the areas of development. This would also help to be confident in taking interviews. And for organizations, looking at hiring data scientists, this can be used as a one-stopshop to understand the technical skill of a candidate, as sometimes this is not very easy and straightforward,” said Banerjee. Interestingly, to build this evaluation process and administer it may not be logistically possible for individual organization and therefore the evaluation of a candidate depends solely on the hiring manager, which may not be an ideal and sustainable model.