Leaderboard

I know this is an older thread, but I wanted to follow-up on my earlier remarks as I believe my recent experience is relevant. My local ASM was kind enough to find and send to me some training manuals this past fall. I spent the past two months thoroughly reviewing the materials at a leisurely pace, and I have to admit that the four classes (Core 3, Advanced Architectures, Project Management, and OO Programming) showed me quite a few interesting methods and approaches which I'm sure will prove useful at some point. I took the exam today and scored a glorious 56. My impression of many of the questions was that they were vague, poorly constructed, or ambiguous. Once I got past the confusing syntax, the majority of questions fell into four distinct categories: 1. Who cares? 2. Nobody uses this feature or does it this way. 3. This is not applicable to any real-life project issue. 4. (None of these choices) or (more than one of these choices) is the "best" way to do <whatever>. To put this in perspective, I took the online example test two months ago (before reviewing any of the course materials), and scored a 52; today I got a 56. From this viewpoint, the training materials are completely irrelevant to the exam. In my opinion, the majority of the questions on the exam were almost totally detached from any realistic issues or considerations that a LabVIEW professional actually faces. After the exam, I chatted with a manager at the local Platinum Alliance Partner, who told me that I'm in good company -- over the past 2 years, nobody there has passed the CLA-R the first time, and in fact some of their most experienced engineers required multiple attempts to pass. I cannot fathom the process followed by the Customer Education and Certification folks who put this program together. Anybody from NI out there listening?