Instructor training -- any additional training

kellv

Howdy y'all,

I'm hoping to learn more about instructor training over this.

There are things that I seem to be struggling with for the exam. Of course, the simple answer is study do the training, and I did! Honest!

I've run through the course in and out. I've also gone through the learning files that accompanied the training. I feel I get it. I even timed myself knowing time restrictions and how slow the remote machines are (I have a strong reliable connection). I'd go back and tally my score, which was well above passing. Things seriously looked good this time.

However, come testing time, I didn't pass. I'd watch my time, attempt to go after items I felt confident in; watching my time knowing the pitfalls. Others I'd go back to later; trying to budget my time.

One area that was difficult were some of the complex sections and how they were worded asking for a solution. None of the stuff I studied, especially here, seemed to align with what was being asked, but I sat there puzzled wondering what was really being asked.

So, from that, I figured that what I should do is search for a way to better train.

1. Are there instructor led places you can suggest?
2. Where are the good video training place that goes over this?
3. Are there other ways to train for this?

Help,

Kelly

P.S. hopefully this doesn't break the rules of the conversation of the exam by me keeping it vague. If it does, please let me know, and I'll remove parts or all of this.

krave

Hi, Kelly. I am sorry to hear this. I walked through the tutorial twice before taking the exam. It helped me to discover some points I missed in the first run. As I mentioned in another post, the exam points out of the scope of the tutorial seemingly occupy around 10% - 15% and that won't hurt the score much. My exam score was 82.

The best go-to places to dig further IMO are nodejs.org and MDN. I will search the puzzled parts for me on those sites and go through the docs while practicing the examples. That helps me a lot not only for the exam but also for my daily work.

Maybe you can share some puzzled ones and we can discuss further.

Hopefully this could help. Have a great day. You got this.

kellv

@krave ,

Thank you for responding and the insight. (Also, congrats!)

One area I struggled with was the wording over some of the io (fs) items. It simply didn't make sense to what they wanted (and I'm from / live in the US). Maybe how it's very developer worded, I am a dev, but I also have to engage with a lot of non-dev stakeholders. Like, another way to view this... if I'm in an interview, and I don't understand what is being asked, I can seek more info in hopes of getting to what they want solved. Here the proctor doesn't know, or maybe this one didn't? So I couldnt tell what I was try to solve for them.

For the specifics the best I can say is that it didn't feel like a watch question, but it didn't feel like an examine a file stats question either. I wish I could better call this out.

For me, I did reach out to figure out where I was worst at, and they gave me a top 3 of the lowest scored areas (no score information on any area), which I appreciate.

Either way, it's difficult to understand why I failed in the others, but all I know is that I did.

Still, to have something to teach or align more with the testing (and wording) here would be grand for me.

krave

@kellv
Thank you! As far as I can recall, some aspects about fs examined should be around reading directories, reading files and writing files. I combined them with loop and conditional judgement for checking file names and so on to figure out the solution. I am not a native English speaker. My main language is Chinese. TBH, wording may not be very problematic for me. And perhaps you have noticed that there are one or two questions being accompanied with Chinese readme files. Those files helped me a little but very limited to problem solving. Since you are a native English speaker, I think you have good reason to report the issues about wording of the io items. Good luck and have a great day!

davidmarkclements

hey @kellv thanks for the feedback. The course questions were initially developed by a group of industry tech leads and architects across several industries who specialised in Node.js. After this they went through multiple rigorous reviews by leading developers, language specialists and undergo constant psychometric analysis.

Throughout this (ongoing) process, a core philosophy that was decided from the start, is we cannot spell out the exact programmatic steps we expect a candidate to take. This decision came from three guiding philosophies

• agnosticism - The questions can be answered with Node core or any dependency you'd like to install and use. As long as the problem is solved.
• pragmatism - the exam is testing candidates problem-solving abilities, not specific approaches or specific API knowledge. We're testing lateral thinking combined with coding knowledge, and that coding knowledge is not limited to training content, but all training content does provide a least one approach for every question on the exam.
• rigour - for the certification to be worth anything, we cannot compromise a questions integrity by using language that actually hints at or provides any specific approaches that could be used

The dilemma for every single one of the questions, is we have to ask you to do something, without specifically detailing any approach that could be taken to answer the question. This limits the way we can describe the requirements.

Having said all of that, we are constantly looking to improve the wording of questions, so your feedback will be taken into consideration as we do that.

kellv

Hi @davidmarkclements ,

Thank you for responding as well. The points above sound similar to the discussions I've seen you explain to the crowd at a node conference (could be the same speaking event, but they seem the same). I appreciate how helpful you've been on here and your demeanor.

While I get the response and sending feedback, which is nice (and thank you). This training course is nice and has helped many, is simply not working for me and certain questions on the tests.

Do you have any suggestions around other training?

Cheers,

Kelly

kellv

Also, thanks for the discussion too @krave ! :D

d.m.c

hey @kellv understood - currently I don't but I'm going to put out feelers, I'll update here if anything comes up

kellv

Thanks @xdxmxc !