<p>I'm looking for suggestions for a beginner level ASP/XML test.  Essentially I'm trying to hire an extremely junior programmer.  I'm in the process of trying to hire a junior programmer to help maintain a large code base of somewhat repetitive ASP pages.  I'm slowly in the process of making more modular, maintainable code but until that happens I'm trying to get away from having to change "one little thing" too often.</p>

<p>Anyway I'm looking for suggestions of ways to test for ability to handle these tasks.  The applications I've been getting are people with minimal technical experience looking to "break into IT."  I'm all for giving someone a chance, but I also want to test for some base level ability.</p>

I would ask some basic math questions involving sets, statistics and the like. That kind of question can be somewhat hard, as they don´t depend on a background in IT.
If you want to include some programming questions I would ask something in the line:
"How do you implement integer division without using the division operator"
Another idea is teach them on the spot a made up language, something like
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, with four basic commands and some loop directives and ask then to draw squares, circles and what not with it.