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Prove It! - Sun Java 2 Exam Relived

 
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So, last week I went and had an interview with a headhunter/placement firm. The interview went fine but as soon as it was done she asked me if I wouldn't mind taking a test. I was a little surprised but I said sure and she went through the list of available exams and let me choose which one I wanted to take, the Java 2 exam.
Now, this exam was 43 questions, written by Prove It! (who are they?) and not all in the same league with the Sun Java 2 Programmer exam. First, none of the code snippets were indented so the code was left aligned. And, on top of that, there were numerous grammatical errors and there was no space to open up a separate window to take notes. So, what was the end result?
I scored 7% lower on this exam than on the Java 2 exam. I don't think I did that poorly but I am not sure what kind of numbers she was looking for. The bottom line is that recruiters are now testing their candidates so when you think your Java 2 exam is over, it may not really be over!
 
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The bottom line is that recruiters are now testing their candidates
Well, that's exactly what I would do if I was an IT recruiter... People tell crap in interviews and in my opinion the only way to really assess somebody's knowledge is by testing him/her yourself.
Now, according to you, the problem seems to be that the test was a big joke and has been written by you-don't-wanna-know-who... I wouldn't take that test into deep considerations if "Prove it" is not even able to indent their code properly.
This is poor professionalism if professionalism at all.
 
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I had to take a BrainBench exam for a potential job the other day. It was hard, and some of the stuff was a bit obscure but the actual exam was well put together. I follow these things and I have never heard of Proove IT.
 
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My friend was asked to take a Domino (Lotus Notes) Application Development "Prove It" test by a recruiter. He is a Principal Certified Domino Professionl. He was telling me that Prove It test was full of how to open a file, compose a mail, how to set up meetings etc. It was a joke as per him.
There were no questions on Scripting and real development. You know what happen. He failed in this exam. He was trying to explain his recruiter but you have to live with some IT recruiters who couldn't differentiate between JavaScript and Java.
I heard that many big six accounting firms will first ask you to take a brainbench test before they would consider your job applications.
 
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I have had to take a Prove It! exam in the past for IMS (I'm a mainframe programmer trying to get over to the PC programming world. If you enjoy being laughed at, try doing that.). The exam I took was over the internet and was well worded and structured. I would assume that different exams are written by different people with different abilities. Still, how hard is it to have something that important proof read? No excuse for it. Their web site is www.proveit.com if anyone is interested.
 
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Ricardo the best of luck with your search, the only thing I can add is to bring a copy of the certificate with you next time. I would never take a test given to me by a head-hunter unless it was prepared by the employer who would be hiring me. The technical interview should be left to the employer and asked by competent working professionals. In all my dealings, head-hunter don't have a clue what there're talking about and don't understand the scope of a job requirement... I see a lot of posting for UNIX only developers who will be working with VB, the last time I checked VB ran on Windows, or MUST HAVE Java skills, will be developing javascript and html for our client!
[ March 16, 2002: Message edited by: Rajinder Yadav ]
 
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