Codam Coding College — Piscine Day 5 — Exam 00

Oof ← That´s the sound of me failing my first exam.

Welcome to the first exam of the Piscine.

I am actually very impressed with myself. I only got 16/100, but it´s really common for people to get a 0 on their first exam (and a lot of people I spoke to did actually get a 0). To be honest, I´m not even sure what score qualifies you as passing.

I should be more upset I guess? Disappointed? I feel happy, though. The reason is: I spent a lot of time on my Shell00 exercises and only started the C00 exercises the night before the exam. I also spent a lot of time evaluating other people´s Shell00 assignments and getting my own evaluated (read my previous post), meanwhile people kept telling me ¨you should really move on to the C00 exercises!¨ I woke up early the day of the exam and worked on the exercises a bit from home. I got all the way to C04 and then headed to Amsterdam and arrived about 20 minutes before the exam (the exam started at 4 p.m. and went until 8 p.m.). Apparently, I missed some Salsa activities before the exam, though, so that was a bummer.

Anyway, we were randomly assigned to either the upstairs or downstairs cluster. I lucked out and got the downstairs cluster where I´ve been working all week. The upstairs cluster has the European formatted keyboard, which I haven´t worked with yet. That would have been an extra struggle during the already difficult exam. We were given very vague instructions on how to start with the exam. The rest of the instructions are written in an ¨exam shell¨ that pops up on your computer. You have to interact with it for further instructions, but it´s still all super confusing and vague. I think I spent about 30 minutes just reading one paragraph of instructions and trying to find out what the heck was going on.

I just used Vim to write my code. A lot of people had been using Visual Studio Code all week and had never touched Vim, only to find out that Visual Studio Code wasn´t installed on their exam computer. As I said, I only got 1 question right. I spent about an hour on the second question just trying to submit it. I think the logic behind the code was correct, but I was just missing something. Probably a semicolon *sigh*.

I´m going to keep working on the C00 exercises and eventually submit for an evaluation so I can move on to C01.