Isn't a lot of the job of software engineering to quickly and concisely communicate complicated concepts? Might this actually be an accurate work sample? How else might you measure something like this?
Also the next few lines kinda address what you are saying:
> It also might be that they know them inside-and-out but aren’t used to answering questions on the fly, or that our question didn’t use the vocabulary they’re familiar with, or that they misheard the question and answered a different one. It made quite a difference just to phrase the feedback in a way which acknowledged all those possibilities.
Also the next few lines kinda address what you are saying:
> It also might be that they know them inside-and-out but aren’t used to answering questions on the fly, or that our question didn’t use the vocabulary they’re familiar with, or that they misheard the question and answered a different one. It made quite a difference just to phrase the feedback in a way which acknowledged all those possibilities.