Choose best/worst actions under OA pressure
Overview
This question evaluates judgment and leadership competencies in data science — including risk assessment, stakeholder impact analysis, integrity under time pressure, and handling failing tests and collaborator input — and falls under the Behavioral & Leadership category.
Behavioral Scenario: Time-Boxed OA With Hidden Test Failure
Context
You are a data scientist candidate 70 minutes into a 90-minute online assessment (OA). Your Pandas pipeline passes visible samples but fails a hidden test. A teammate on chat offers an unverified "quick fix." The instructions warn that wrong assumptions can invalidate the model. You must also complete a mandatory post-OA survey before the deadline.
Task
Choose the best and worst actions among the options below, and briefly justify your choices in terms of stakeholder impact, risk, and integrity.
- A) Freeze the current pipeline, document assumptions and edge cases, run remaining unit tests, and reserve ~8 minutes to finish the survey on time.
- B) Replace your deduping logic with the teammate’s snippet without understanding it, rerun everything, and skip the survey to spend all remaining time debugging.
- C) Document the failing test with a minimal reproduction, add guardrails that fail fast on detected anomalies, submit partial functionality transparently, and complete the survey quickly at the end.
- D) Add more model features to improve visible metrics, ignore leakage warnings, use synthetic data to fill gaps, and delay the survey past the deadline.
Solution
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