My experience of the CGU IST screening exam « Blog Archive

I took my screening exam on Jan 23, and I want to write down what my experience of it was like so that I can remember and share it with other people who are to take it in the future.

The days leading up to the exam

I studied for around four months, all told. First, I studied between late June and the first week of August, and then between beginning of December and Jan 23. As I’ve described before, the way I study is to first prepare detailed notes which incorporate data from all the source materials I have, then generate lists of concepts and definitions I need to know, and then figure out some general toolkits that I might apply to questions in order to answer them.

I’d finished my notes near the middle of December, generated my lists of concepts to study from shortly thereafter, and developed my business and policy toolkit and my research toolkit towards the middle of January. So the last week before the exam I spent going over and over the lists of concepts, quizzing myself on whether I knew them or not. I would print them out, cross out the ones I thought I knew, highlight the ones I didn’t know, then go back to my notes for review.

I was feeling confident, because there were only a few things that I thought I was having trouble with, and I felt like I was just filling in the last nooks and crannies.

The day before the exam

The exam was on Jan 23rd, and I got a hotel room at the Howard Johnson’s in Claremont for the night of the 22nd. To drive between my home in Altadena and Claremont to get there in time for the exam’s start at 9:30am on Friday would have meant that I would have to leave very early in order to either beat or deal with rush hour traffic, and I didn’t want to arrive at my test all stressed out from the drive. More importantly, my daughter still wakes up four to five times a night, and I wanted to get a good night’s sleep.

I spent the 22nd familiarizing myself with the computers in the computer lab in which I would be taking the test by answering some practice questions. Then I ran around town buying supplies: ear plugs (because the clacking of the keys on the keyboards of the other people in the room was quite loud), drinks, and healthy brain food for breakfast and lunch the next day.

My goal for the day was to not study too much, because I didn’t want to stress my self out trying to cram every last thing into my head. I wanted to be rested and filled with energy for the exam, mentally and physically. I stopped studing around 4:30pm, and took a walk. I talked to my family over Skype (I always feel like I really live in the 21st century when I do video chat), had dinner, watched a movie (”Jumper”, which I liked, for the most part), and read a little fiction before bed.

I had a moment of panic at 9pm because I got a page from one of the critical servers at work saying that something appeared to be dreadfully wrong. I checked it out immediately, saw that there wasn’t anything wrong with the server itself, and decided that it was a problem with the monitoring server. A bit more investigation showed that I was right, but it took ten minutes for my heart to stop pounding.

I went to bed at 9:30pm, and slept well, lulled to sleep by the sound of the freeway 60 yards from my room. I went to bed feeling good, feeling like I had done all I could do to prepare.

The exam itself

I got up at 7:30am feeling well rested and confident, but ever so slightly nervous. I ate my breakfast, and got coffee at Starbucks. I arrived at the IS building, where the test would be given, at 8:30am and met the other people taking the test. There were to be just three of us: Jesus Canelon Herrera, Justin Ku, and me. We started the first session at 9:20am.

It was databases, systems and networking in the morning, and as soon as I saw the questions, I felt optimistic: I felt that I could answer all of them. The questions were complicated, with many subparts, and one hour per question was hardly enough time for me to just barely cover them. The networking question, for example, had sixteen sub-parts (if you counted all the various concepts that you had to define and discuss). That’s about three to six minutes per sub-part, if you spent an hour on the whole question. I did end up spending about an hour on each question, and I answered them in the order of how confident I was about being able to answer them: the systems question first, then the database question, and finally the networking question. I was racing to complete the last section of the networking question as Rita (the proctor) walked in and said time was up at 12:20pm.

We broke for lunch, to return at 2pm to start the second half. Jesus and Justin went off somewhere for lunch, and I went to have lunch in my car and get in some last minute review for the second half. Since I had databases, systems, and networking in the morning, I knew I would have two management and policy questions and one research question in the afternoon.

I tried to review for a while, but couldn’t decide what I should be looking at, and so stopped and just went back inside the building and tried to think of nothing important. I was largely successful and went back into the testing room at 2pm still feeling pretty confident.

When I saw the three questions for the afternoon, I had several minutes of near panic. The first question was about a topic that Applegate spends maybe three pages on and deals with very generally, and asked about research concepts and frameworks. I hardly understood the question at first. In the third question, one of the three parts covered a topic I consciously chose not to learn very well because I figured it seemed so peripheral that I would never see a question on it. Wrong! On the second question, I felt pretty comfortable, and so I started there and finished that in an hour and felt pretty good about it. Then I went back to the first question, applied my business and policy toolkit and my research toolkit and got something pretty reasonable out of it. On the last question, I answered the first and third parts mostly to my satisfaction, and then stared blankly at the second part for thirty minutes, finally squeezing out everything I could think of on that topic. And then, it was over.

I was burned out. I had started to reach the ends of my stamina while writing my answers to the last question sub-parts. The second half of the exam spooked me, and I left the building feeling somewhat discouraged. I no longer had the confidence about my answers and ability that I had had throughout the morning.

The immediate aftermath

Grading the exams takes a month, apparently, so I’ve got a while to wait before I hear how I did. The exams are graded on the following scale: “D” for doctoral level, “M” for masters level, “U” for undergraduate level. You must get at least four answers graded at “D” level and none at “U” level to pass. If I don’t pass, I’ve got one more chance before I get booted from the program and have to leave with a Master’s degree.

I had thought that once I had finished the exam that I could finally stop thinking about it and letting it run my life. But that didn’t happen: I just traded worrying about how I would do for worring about how I did. I’ve spent the time since the end of my exam worrying. Trying to go back and figure out how I did. Was there anything that could be graded at U level (”undergraduate”)? Could I think of four questions where I could say that I did “D” level work (”doctoral”)? I don’t know on either. Mostly because I don’t know what separates a “D” answer from an “M” answer, and from a “U” answer.

I should probably tell myself that my own standards are very high, and I equate “D” largely with perfection. I may be thinking of “D” level as “TF” level — tenured faculty. But maybe I’m not; I don’t know.

The thought that I might not pass makes me sick to my stomach, and I can see that if it does come to pass, I will have to work hard to not let that undermine the my own sense of my abilities. I have to let failing the exam not become something that I use to sabotage myself when taking my next (and last) try. I’ve thought this many times already since Jan 23rd.

Largely, because the grading system is so unknown, I feel like the only thing you can do on the screening exam is to go in and do the best you can do. I really studied long and hard for this exam. And when I took it, I felt like I performed near the best of my ability. And still there were things that I didn’t know as well as I needed to, I think. I just hope that that is good enough, and that I can stop thinking about it soon and get on with my life.

Today

By the end of Monday after the test, I no longer thought about how I did — the rest of my life had taken over. I do feel a little gnawing hole in my stomach whenever I think about receiving my results, but that passes quickly.

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