Am I stupid or is this retarded?

[KHRZ]

Ok so I got my result from the IT exam... note, this is a basic course for people who can't any coding, for engineers/physicists etc. The curriculum book was like this:


As you can see, plenty of technical stuff, such as what video game console/flat screen to buy, and what the left and rigth button of a mouse is called. It costs 160USD here, so I never really saw the need to waste my cash.

As for the lecturer, IDK if that guy was really a professor at anything, infact didn't seem like he had really passed this IT course himself; During lectures, he encountered problems such as finding the backspace button on the keyboard, and couldn't get why his division function he was showing us produced error messages. When someone explained it was because he had used the division operator instead of the argument operator, he was still skeptical and didn't want to change it. A caricature that bears a nice resemblance to my lecturer, looks like this:


So obviously I didn't waste my time going to his lectures either. I programmed about 150 hours in actionscript 2 last year, so I knew most of the stuff already. I did all the partly obligatory training exercises, which were no problem.

So I went to the exam, answered all the questions, coded all the crap (Last task: Code a function to read/update/etc a high score list). All easy shit so I expected A obviously.

Then I get my result today, it is a C... WTF? I check what tasks my points were drained at, and it's mostly the high score list tasks. I see the solution, and the problem is clear

So the exam came with a list of MATLAB inbuilt functions you were allowed to use. I figured I'd use it whenever there's something I couldn't code myself, (such as reading from/writing to file functions etc.). The rest I just wrote myself.

And that was the problem, whenever there was some trivial function on the list, such as one for finding the sum of elements in a vector, it was used in the solution, but since I just coded it myself, I was drained massive points..

[dannzen]

1on1 copy of the lecture or FAIL
only achievable with extensive memorize of every 'WORD' (not only the page)

just bullshit............................................

[DacoTaco]

imo bullshit. IF your code is clean and your code does the job and follows the instructions, you should be fine. period.

[Zee530]

Our exams here are pretty much graded the same way, whether its correct or not so far it wasnt in the lecture notes or handbook then its gonna be F, Our problem here is our lecturers are too goddamn lazy so most of them just give post-grads to mark them and if what you have isnt on the marking scheme you fail

Don't worry KHRZ, this is a usual thing for me, i most of the time have to go back to the lecturer and explain to him 'my answer was right and you failed me dumbass' and usually after this he changes the mistake and i get my full marks, well, some of the times

[Dumachum]

You're being trained to be someones employee, not a thinker. What else is new?

[Runo]

Isn't there anyway you can argue the grade? Ask for a second correction from other person??

[KHRZ]

I can complain about it, or take the exam again (probably more effective).

Anyway, the solution obviously is simpler as it uses premade functions. I guess I kinda misunderstood the difficulty level, as most of the challenge for me was in coding what you were supposed to find in the list.

[HomelandReloaded]

It's kind of preparing you for a job in the public sector or in a large corporation.

[NaturalViolence]

IT exam

basic course for people who can't any coding

what video game console/flat screen to buy, and what the left and rigth button of a mouse is called.

I knew what the rest of your post was going to be as soon as I read that. Your situation is quite common I'm afraid. Although usually I hear these kinds of stories about the A+ certification exam.

I myself took an A+ class just for the hell of it. At that point in time I had not yet heard any of the horror stories or done any research into the subject of any kind (hell I didn't even know what the A+ certification was), I just mentioned to one of my professors that I was interested in taking a general computer knowledge class and he recommended the A+ class.

The entire class was painfully easy, nearly everything that we were taught was stuff I knew in middle school or early high school, as a result I never even bothered to get the book, just like you. And the professor wasn't the brightest bulb. He was an adjunct instead of a fulltime professor who managed the college's tech support. He was pretty much teaching straight from the book and the book was constantly wrong. I began pointing out these errors during class, a few I can remember off the top of my head are
-actually a GPU cannot run x86 code
-actually a core 2 duo is a 64 bit cpu
-actually that's not a midi port, that's a vga port
and so on.....

The professor began to get annoyed with me so I learned to keep my mouth shut and just ace the class. Most of the rest of the class (except one other student who I could tell was like me but chose to keep his mouth shut and read tech articles the entire class instead of paying attention to the lecture, and in retrospect he had the right idea) consisted of middle age adults working minimum wage jobs looking for a way out who knew absolutely nothing about computers.

Every week we had a quiz to review the lecture material. These quizzes came straight from the company that made the book, and they were filled with the most retarded questions you had ever seen. Questions like:
The speed of a cpu is measured in:
A. Hertz
B. Kilohertz
C. Megahertz
D. Gigahertz

The answer was B, I shit you not. Besides the fact that they are all the same unit of measurement, hertz, cpu speed is not measured in hertz, it is usually measured in MIPS or FLOP/s. That question was so retarded that I still remember it to this day. But that was just one of dozens of equally retarded questions.

I started doing a little reading about the A+ exam online and everywhere I looked on the internet all I found were horror stories like mine, classes filled with idiots taught by idiot professors who give retarded quiz questions from a book that was constantly wrong. The exam costs something like $175 per attempt to take and from what I was reading online it seems that the exam questions are every bit as retarded as the quiz questions were. Microsoft tried to parade the exam around like it's a requirement in the industry yet the industry doesn't even look at it or care that you have it. These horror stories included people coming away with a certification confident in getting a job only to realize that all of the employers that they submitted applications to don't care about it at all. So obviously after reading this stuff I decided not to take the exam. I did get an A in the class with almost no effort, but I would certainly not recommend it to anyone, it's a waste of time and money, nothing more.

By the way high schools are starting to teach A+ classes now as an honors or sometimes even an A.P. credit class believe it or not. Apparently if you know what a motherboard is in high school you must be a genius.

I've seen similar stories with many IT exams and private vocational tech schools. Many of them are scams designed to take away money from the desperate only to provide a useless certification or unaccredited degree. This is the problem with for-profit private education. These companies are only concerned about their profits, some of them provide a good service in return, and some just don't care, so you have to be careful.

[Runo]

But does having this certificates actually makes any decent difference on your resumé? Cause if it does it might be worth the pain. Or do the companies know it ain't worth shit?