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Home > Archive > microsoft.public.cert.exam.mcsd > December 2002 > Does Microsoft try to trick you with wording in their questions?
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Does Microsoft try to trick you with wording in their questions?
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| I have never known what purpose trick questions serve if the goal is
for certification of abilities. Here is an example. The idiots at
Transcender had a question that goes blah, blah blah... The user will
select music by category and a tempo... blah, blah, blah... The data
should be sorted first by song title, then by duration.... blah, blah,
blah.
It's one of those "choose all the correct answer that applies"
question. One of the correct answer according to Transcender is
dataview.Sort = "category, tempo ASC"
Hmmm... Well, ok. I guest that wouldn't hurt the requirements, but
the description ask for the data to be sorted by song title then
duration. If Microsoft asks a question like this, I'm screwed. I
still don't see how Transcender think the above is one of the correct
answer. Anyone understand the logic? To me, this is bending the
language meaning of the answer and question to somehow trip the exam
taker. It's ludicrous.
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| Alan Davis 2002-12-18, 5:23 am |
| >I have never known what purpose trick questions serve if the goal is
>for certification of abilities.
Me neither.
> If Microsoft asks a question like this, I'm screwed. I
>still don't see how Transcender think the above is one of the correct
>answer. Anyone understand the logic? To me, this is bending the
>language meaning of the answer and question to somehow trip the exam
>taker. It's ludicrous.
Some of the questions set about to confuse and mislead you. But this
just helps the tester as it makes it easier to find out which of the
given answer's are *not* correct which makes it easier to 'guess'
answers you do know. Just make sure you read the questions thoroughly.
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| "Loc" <LocNguyen10@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:960653bc.0212180255.bd01fb4@posting.google.com...
> I have never known what purpose trick questions serve if the goal is
> for certification of abilities.
FWIW, I very very rarely see any questions on a live MS exam that I find
vague. There were a few on the SQL 7 70-028 that I don't think I understood,
and recent beta exams have had a small number - about 1 out of 90 questions.
I do comment on each to the effect of "I don't think I understand what
you're asking for", and presumably MS evaluates such feedback to determine
if I was just being ignorant or there really is ambiguity and the beta
question should not reach the live pool.
> Here is an example.
<snipped>
> Hmmm... Well, ok. I guest that wouldn't hurt the requirements, but
> the description ask for the data to be sorted by song title then
> duration. If Microsoft asks a question like this, I'm screwed.
I don't believe MS asks questions with serious flaws like that. While
practice exams are of great value to many people, I find that the quality of
questions on the live exams is always noticably higher than any practice
exam. It may still be good practice for you, especially if you can
thoroughly analyze and 'prove' any flaws you find. Frankly, I don't trust
the practice exam vendors to have the same level of expertise from the
question creators and it also seems that MS invests significantly more in
various quality control steps (beta testing being only one of several
phases).
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