03-20-2007, 12:30 PM
Well, I just finished taking DSST Principles of Statistics. "Woefully underprepared" seems like a good description of how I felt prior to taking this exam. Yet, I think that I probably passed. Or maybe I'm being overly hopeful. I certainly had enough distractions:
1. I realized when I got there that they only have metered parking: 25 cent per hour. I only had one quarter and no money other than plastic. I drove around trying to find somewhere I could park without a high probability (hehe) of receiving a parking ticket to no avail. I ended up depositing my quarter and hoping for the best (no ticket! Woohoo!).
2. The proctor at the testing center always seems cross. Or testy (hehe!). He seems like you're putting him out by having the nerve to take a test. I hate that.
3. 5 minutes into the test, some administrator in an office next to the testing center starting flirting raucously with a student (my assumption based on word to giggle ratio). That continued for about 45 minutes.
4. After the above concluded, someone in the floor below decided to start doing some reconstruction of the building. For the next hour, I endured very loud hammering and pounding followed by punctuations of broken glass or whatever it was that they were destroying. I was not pleased. I couldn't even block it out by covering my ears. It was too loud. It finally stopped when I had about 5 questions left.
5. The occasional cursing of the cross test proctor (presumably at the noise?).
6. Proctor coming to door repeatedly to see if I was done.
Yeah. It was easily the most distracted I've *EVER* been in a standardized test. I felt totally frazzled by it all. I probably could have completed it all in 1.5 hours without distractions, but with them, I feel lucky to have only spent 2.5 there.
As for the actual questions: I'd guess that I was confident of my answer at least half of the time, reasonably sure a quarter of the time, dubious an eighth, and absolutely stumped an eighth. I also feel like I had *seen* everything that was on the test at least once in my preparation with the exception of one "leaf-and-stem" question (I don't think I had ever heard of that before and was stumped). I guessed that it was something like binary, or an alternate form of counting, but didn't know how it worked and couldn't figure it out just from the provided data.
My impression is that had I studied for more than 3 or 4 days, it would have been fairly easy. As it was, I stupidly tried to prepare by first making sure I understood algebra/precalculus, hoping to knock out that test first (HAH!), then preparing for stats. Bad move. I know that there is some algebra on this test, but very little. If I had it to do over again, I would have spent 2 weeks preparing starting with IC, then maybe branching out into other materials (I had a Statistics Demystified book that helped).
But, of course, much of this is just conjecture until I know what score I received. I'll let you know.
1. I realized when I got there that they only have metered parking: 25 cent per hour. I only had one quarter and no money other than plastic. I drove around trying to find somewhere I could park without a high probability (hehe) of receiving a parking ticket to no avail. I ended up depositing my quarter and hoping for the best (no ticket! Woohoo!).
2. The proctor at the testing center always seems cross. Or testy (hehe!). He seems like you're putting him out by having the nerve to take a test. I hate that.
3. 5 minutes into the test, some administrator in an office next to the testing center starting flirting raucously with a student (my assumption based on word to giggle ratio). That continued for about 45 minutes.
4. After the above concluded, someone in the floor below decided to start doing some reconstruction of the building. For the next hour, I endured very loud hammering and pounding followed by punctuations of broken glass or whatever it was that they were destroying. I was not pleased. I couldn't even block it out by covering my ears. It was too loud. It finally stopped when I had about 5 questions left.
5. The occasional cursing of the cross test proctor (presumably at the noise?).
6. Proctor coming to door repeatedly to see if I was done.
Yeah. It was easily the most distracted I've *EVER* been in a standardized test. I felt totally frazzled by it all. I probably could have completed it all in 1.5 hours without distractions, but with them, I feel lucky to have only spent 2.5 there.
As for the actual questions: I'd guess that I was confident of my answer at least half of the time, reasonably sure a quarter of the time, dubious an eighth, and absolutely stumped an eighth. I also feel like I had *seen* everything that was on the test at least once in my preparation with the exception of one "leaf-and-stem" question (I don't think I had ever heard of that before and was stumped). I guessed that it was something like binary, or an alternate form of counting, but didn't know how it worked and couldn't figure it out just from the provided data.
My impression is that had I studied for more than 3 or 4 days, it would have been fairly easy. As it was, I stupidly tried to prepare by first making sure I understood algebra/precalculus, hoping to knock out that test first (HAH!), then preparing for stats. Bad move. I know that there is some algebra on this test, but very little. If I had it to do over again, I would have spent 2 weeks preparing starting with IC, then maybe branching out into other materials (I had a Statistics Demystified book that helped).
But, of course, much of this is just conjecture until I know what score I received. I'll let you know.
I'm an engineer. Go figure.
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