Screening exam post mortem « Blog Archive

In this article, I write about what I think I learned about the CGU IST screening exam that would be helpful to those who will take the exam in the future (including myself, although I hope I won’t need it). Here are my observations:

It felt like driving on a winding in dense fog for six hours
The exam questions are complex
You have to be both accurate and brief
Trying to predict what topics will be important is both necessary and hard
Learning specific Word tasks saved me a lot of time and worry
I actively managed my morale, and that helped
Making analysis toolkits and being very familiar with them really paid off

It felt like driving on a winding road in dense fog for six hours

I’ve been trying to think of an adjective to describe how I felt during the exam. “Intense” comes to mind, but it doesn’t really capture it. The best I can do is to liken it to other situations. I felt something like I did when I was driving on a winding road along the edge of a cliff in very dense fog in Pasa Robles a few years ago. I couldn’t see more than 20 yards in front of me. I couldn’t stop or even slow down too much below 30 or 40 miles per hour because a car in back of me would not see us in time to avoid crashing into us. I could hardly see where the lane was, and I knew than any oncoming driver would be in the same boat. The world dropped away except for the 20 yards in front of me, and I had to remain extremely focused. I knew what the stakes were. That’s what it was like to do the exam. Only for six hours instead of the twenty minutes I drove in that thick fog.

What I had thought would happen to me when I was answering my practice questions did, in fact, happen: under the pressure of the actual exam, I thought and wrote much faster than I had been doing for the practice questions. I ended up writing between five and seven pages for each question.

The questions are complex

As I said in my description of taking the exam, real exam questions are complex, much more complex than my practice questions. I should have realized that from looking at previous year’s questions, but until I actually had the actual exam questions that I had to answer personally staring at me, I didn’t realize the full extent of the complexity.

First, each question has a lot of parts. The question with the least number of parts was the research question, with three parts, and the one with the most was the networking question, with fifteen parts. By parts, I mean individual questions that you have to answer, not necessarily the numbered or lettered parts.

Second, each question has hidden, implicit parts. Many questions were of the form: “compare X to Y”; or “why is A important?” when A is an obvious alternative to B and C. Before you can answer these questions, you must define X and Y, and A, B and C (because “why is A important?” really means “why is A more important than B and C?”). When you count these implicit questions, the research question had seven parts, and the networking question had nineteen parts. And of course, you’re probably going to have to drag in any number of additional issues, models and concepts in your answers, which means that you have to define them, too.

What this means is that on most of the questions, you do not have a lot of time to think about what you’re going to write. You’ve got to know what you’re talking about and write it quickly. And you can’t be long winded about it — you’ve got to get a succinct summary down in just a few paragraphs or sentences. This was the real difference between my practice questions and writing the actual question. I mostly spent more than an hour on my practice questions, and many of those topics turned out to be just implicit questions in the actual exam, not even explicit ones. Which meant that I spent maybe five minutes summarizing what I wrote in an hour in practice.

You have to be both accurate and brief

Brevity is the soul of wit, and it is also critical in answering questions. Taking what I’ve said above about question complexity, in nearly every question, you’re going to be having to cover a lot of different topics in a short amount of time. Some of those topics you may know in great detail and subtlety. If you try to include all that detail in answering but one part of a question, you will doom yourself to run out of time. It is vital that you be able to distil your knowledge down to exactly what just what you need to say in order to sufficiently answer the question and say no more or less. I really tried to do this in all my answers, but it is not easy. I ended up always feeling slightly anxious that I did not demonstrate the depth or breadth of my knowledge sufficiently, even if I said enough to answer the question sufficiently.

Trying to predict what topics will be important is both necessary and hard

The amount of material that could be in the exam, the stuff you need to be very familiar with, is vast. If I were to double space the notes I wrote for myself in my preparations for studying, I would have several hundred pages. And knowing myself, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to remember everything in detail and synthesize it sufficiently with research concepts and business and policy concepts and models. I had to to try to put myself in the shoes of the question writers and predict what things would be important (in that you could use them to cause someone to have to demonstrate a doctoral level of understanding) and what would not be important (would be too specific or pedantic). And then I spent my time ensuring that I knew the important things as best as I could, and tried to have at least passing familiarity with the rest.

I was mostly accurate with my assessments of importance, but two questions were on topics I did not expect. One business topic I remember as being nearly a footnote, but now that I look back at my notes, I see it was covered in about 20 pages in Applegate. At no point had I ever heard or read anything about research concepts in that area, which was one part of the question. Thankfully, I had worked hard to build my business and policy tookit and my research toolkit, and so I at least had that to fall back on.

The other topic I did not expect was a philosophy of science question — I had decided that that particular philosophy was so unimportant or rare that I wouldn’t be asked about it. I was wrong.

Learning specific Word tasks saved me a lot of time and worry

I know that this is a weird thing to talk about in the context, but I really practiced using the version of Word installed on the computers I’d be using in the exam so that I would spend as little time as I could fiddling with the software. This was a big deal for me because (for various reasons) I have not used Word since the mid-1990s. Keep in mind that, for the exam, you’re not going to be using your CGU account — you’re going to be using a fresh account set up purposely for the exam, and so Word is going to be in its default configuration and not the one you may be used to. You need to know these things:

How to set the page header
How to include a page number in the page header
How to double space your body text
How to make bulleted and numbered lists
How to make section headers
How to setup auto save
How to save to both a floppy disk and a network drive

You turn in your answers on a 3.5 inch floppy disk: one in the morning, and one in the evening. One important thing I learned after the morning session was not to eject the floppy without first quitting all your Word windows. I did so and Word was stuck trying and trying to access the floppy. I eventually had to reboot the computer to get it to work again.

I actively managed my morale, and that helped

So much of doing well on the exam is simply believing that you can pass, and so I really focused on keeping my morale up in the days leading up to the exam and during it.

Seeing my collegues working, and seeing their faces as they work, can be bad for my morale, especially if they look confident when I am not feeling so confident. I sat as far away from my colleagues as possible (which was easy since there were only three of us) and I tried hard not to look over at them at all. Also, at lunchtime I went off by myself: I didn’t want to discuss the first session or hypothesize about the second session. I didn’t want to find out about things that I might have answered wrong or incompletely, or learn about something that thought I understood but didn’t. All I wanted to do was forget the first session completely, and empty my mind in preparation for the second session. And I think that really helped me.

Also, the keyboards in the lab are loud, and it is really distracting to me to hear the other people taking the test typing away on their answers, especially when I’m trying to think. It’s even worse to hear them typing when I’m having trouble. So (after a friend recommended it) I used earplugs, and it was wonderful — I highly recommend it.

Making analysis toolkits and being very familiar with them really paid off

I wrote before the exam that I was planning on making some analysis toolkits in order to prepare me to answer questions from both the research and business & policy perspectives. And then I wrote a series of articles describing all the models in my business & policy toolkit. I had a less formally defined research toolkit (which I should write up) which had Benbesat & Zmud (2003), the four traditions of research (fixed, flexible, design science, action science), the basic philosophies of science (positivism/empiricism, relatvism, scientific realism), design theory/kernel theory and eight or ten of the core IS theories.

This really paid off in all of the second session questions, because I used my toolkits on all of them. If I hadn’t had my toolkits, I don’t know what I would have done for SCR4, one of the business questions: I needed both my research toolkit and my business & policy toolkit.

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