The last exam I sat was way back in 1989, when I did my GCSEs.  On Tuesday, I had the joys of sitting the M255 exam – and after checking out the past & specimen papers for the course, I wasn’t hugely confident.  Having to wade through Belfast’s flash floods to get to the exam centre didn’t help my mood, either.

So.  Twenty “multiple guess” questions, and 4 long-form questions.  Fortunately, the OU seems to follow a pattern with their exam papers – they may change the puzzle or wording, but they seem to stick with testing the same knowledge from year to year, so I had concentrated on those when I was revising – and was hugely pleased to see this year’s paper stuck to the formula.  That made Part B a lot easier than I was expecting – but the problem here is that M255 expects you to write working code under exam conditions, which seems a bit strange.  You’ve got the Java Reference on hand, but it doesn’t cover everything – a “real world” programmer will be able to go dig up references if he can’t remember commands or methods, but under the exam if it’s not in the OU’s Java Reference, your stuffed.  You’ve also got no way of testing or debugging your code as it’s all hand-written – and that creates another set of problems if you have to amend what you’ve already written.  So while the long-form questions weren’t overly difficult as such, it’s hard to see why writing code under exam conditions is deemed necessary & the inability to test your code is a huge disadvantage.

Part A was a little tricker than I had expected. With most questions needing 2 answers from 6 questions, it was usually easy enough to narrow them down to 3 options – after which things started to get a bit vague. I can see myself having lost a few points there.

I went into this with a good enough POCAS score to have visions of a level 1 pass – while the paper was far from a complete disaster, at the moment I think I’d be happy with a level 2. No point worrying about it now, though – results aren’t due until the tail-end of August, so until then it’s on to other things. S194 & T224 await…