If you’re not going to track time in any way, then there’s no way to prevent anyone spending as much time on the problem as they have available. My best suggestion is to just ask people how much time they spent on it. The biggest problem with that is that by telling people the time expectations, you’ll probably get answers within or near that range.
I had one of these tests say they wanted the project delivered as a git repo and would use the timestamps on the commit history to figure out how much time was spent. I just laughed at that and figured the people who knew how to forge the timestamps would do that to make themselves look good.
The only alternative I can think of to explicitly tracking time is to just not give a time expectation and ask how much time they spent. That way, answers aren’t biased by you anchoring a range in their mind. This has other obvious disadvantages, but it would take care of the “candidate spent 2 days on a 2 hour project” problem.
I had one of these tests say they wanted the project delivered as a git repo and would use the timestamps on the commit history to figure out how much time was spent. I just laughed at that and figured the people who knew how to forge the timestamps would do that to make themselves look good.
The only alternative I can think of to explicitly tracking time is to just not give a time expectation and ask how much time they spent. That way, answers aren’t biased by you anchoring a range in their mind. This has other obvious disadvantages, but it would take care of the “candidate spent 2 days on a 2 hour project” problem.