Take-home assignments: test or free ideas/labour? How to tell the difference?

I recently got a take-home assignment for a job before interviewing with someone. The assignment was quite difficult in my opinion: 1) it was a very domain-specific task (predict protein binding affinity from sequences, which I didn't have experience in); 2) the dataset was large (millions of pairs); 3) the distribution of the labels were narrow as the binding affinity was low in most cases.

I was given a week to build a ML model to *accurately* make predictions. I …

datascience dataset difference experience free home ideas job labour opinion protein test