Some Pass4side certification exams
I was in Broomfield, Colorado to contribute to the rewrite of the J2SE Certification exam at the end of December. Other participants in the Exam writing workshop have said that they would blog on the experience so I don’t want to steal their thunder, but the week was exhausting and a lot of fun. For the first three days we each wrote about eight questions. Eight questions - that’s a question an hour - doesn’t sound like it would be so hard. But it’s kind of like those metrics on how much production code an average developer writes in a day which ends up to be a little more than a line an hour.
The goals for the Tiger rewrite of the programmer certification included incorporating some of the new Tiger language and API features in the exam while making the exam lest trivial. You know those bit-shifting questions from the last exam or those questions where you have to know something very subtle about the difference between the spec and the implementation you use every day. The new exam has tried to eliminate those trick questions - but tricks are in the eyes of the beholder.
After three days of writing questions, the group split in two and spent two days reviewing the questions. Many of the questions are straightforward and many of the questions are challenging. Some trick questions did sneak through, but for the most part, if you think a question is a trick question, you can often find the answer by applying a broader knowledge of Java. Sure some of the questions about generics and about threading require specific knowledge, but often the setting of a question contains information about which answers can be eliminated.
Some of the questions use a new format where you drag code into place in a code listing with spaces clearly marked. It’s the closest you can get to writing code on this machine given exam. I’m still not sure how I feel about certification exams in general and what weight should be given to the knowledge that someone did or did not pass such an exam. For the next few weeks you can take the beta exam that resulted from our week locked in a couple of rooms. The beta is very long and is used to further trim down the exam by discarding the weaker questions. If you are interested in taking the beta exam, take a look at the exam goals, spend some time studying, and sign up for it. The beta exam is cheaper than the final exam and your certification counts just as much. This week’s?spotlight provides more details about the beta exam.
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To be clear, using a certification test as to motivate yourself to learn more about something can be quite helpful. However, using a certification as a gating function to exclude people from e.g., a hiring pool is patently insane.
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