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"Hardest" Question Set Results

 
Author and all-around good cowpoke
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When I started on the first Java Exam Cram book in 1999, I realized that creating good sample questions was not all that simple. As I worked up questions for the book I made them available for comment on-line using an applet that emulates the real test environment. Thanks to many useful comments from users, I was able to get rid of ambiguous or incorrect questions. Furthermore, by collecting every set of answers I was able to determine the question topics that caused users the most trouble. I selected a total of 19 questions that seemed to cover most of the exam objective areas and put them in a separate "Hardest" collection.
Taking these questions has been one of the options at my certification resources page since December 1999. There have been slight improvements in the questions as users have raised concerns (thanks folks!) I recently analyzed the collected results from over 65,000 individual tests, resulting in the statistics
shown here in case you are interested.
Bill
 
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Hi william

Can you post the webpage again ? Its down
 
William Brogden
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Sorry about that, we had an extended power failure here last night - it should be back now.
 
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Hi Bill,
I am reading your cram book. Do your two sample tests at the end of the book contain questions with the same order of difficulty as the exam questions? I am asking this because some sites contain much more difficult questions. So whose order of difficulty should I beleive?
Thanks.
Rat
 
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I agree with William, creating good sample questions is not easy.
From our experience it is not only creating the question about a certain topic but also choosing the correct set of answers that makes it a good question.
Within our certification centre it is even more important to provide clear and un-ambigous feedback about the question and answers, the strategy we take is learn by testing, testing and more testing and this requires good feedback.
Thomas De Vos
 
William Brogden
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Marcus and I feel that those questions are close to the real exam questions in difficulty. Hopefully, slightly on the harder side so that when you get to the real exam you won't get a nasty shock.
The point Thomas makes is good - question alternatives should expose common misconceptions. Thats why I have been collecting and analyzing these results for all these years.
Bill
[ May 19, 2003: Message edited by: William Brogden ]
 
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a bit of art, as a gift, the permaculture playing cards
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