June 1, 2014

Took an Online Exam for a Job Application

Took an Online Exam for a Job Application
This morning I finally got online and took an Excel test as part of a job application that I had been putting off. I've taken a few online exams, and classes, on MS Office and without a doubt they'd been rather painful experiences.

Usually the program being used isn't actually MS Office, but instead of lame facsimile. It can be as bad as a simple screen shot loaded up as a webpage with URL hot-spots for clicking to a somewhat interactive database. Almost always they fall far short of the actual program. This is a huge problem when trying to replicate a program that has multiple ways of doing a given task.

Want to save your file? You could mouse over to the File tab and then drop down to Save-As, or you could just hit Ctrl+S. Either way would work in Excel, but the facsimile? Who knows? I had one class where you had to go through a long & boring step-by step guide after you got a question wrong, but the guide...which takes about a minute to show you a 3 second process, showed exactly what I was doing int he first place! You couldn't move on without successfully completing the given question, so I was stuck in a loop of question, slow guide. I finally just took a screen capture video and sent it to my prof to show how messed up the software was.

Now if you are lucky, they word the questions such that you have only one way of successfully completing the task, like asking to only use command key shortcuts.

This morning I was lucky. I knew it was an Excel test, but I could only assume it would be for Excel 2010, which it was. The software was pretty good and I only really had a problem with one question out of 30. I only got one question wrong, not the one I had problems with, but I think it was "do it this way" and I did it another. It may have actually been the save your file question.....I went with the command key options.

Meh....I'll take the 97%.

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