Community-Driven ColdFusion Certification Practice Testing
Posted January 12, 2007 at 2:41 PM by Ben Nadel
NOTE: For the initial demo, I posted questions authored by Brian Simmons for CFMX Exam Buster. I did not mean to take credit for these questions. I was merely putting them up to get people excited about the idea of a community-driven practice application. Brian has created a product, CFMX Exam Buster, that is FANTASTIC. It is a product that I have recommended to many people in the past and continue to today. I offer my deepest apologies to Brian for my lack of judgement. I hope that this can be forgiven and that Brian sees that my intent was not stealing of questions.
Recently, I have seen a mix of emails and comments flying around on CF-Talk and in my office about ColdFusion certification testing and ColdFusion certification study groups, so I though I would try something out. Over the past few mornings, I have thrown together what is a "proof of concept" for a community driven site to help people study for the ColdFusion MX 7 Certification test.
The idea here is that generous members of the ColdFusion community would go into this ColdFusion Certification Testing center (online) and submit questions and up to five answers. These questions would then get reviewed for approval / rejection by other members of the community. Then an administrator would go in and do a final approval on the questions. These questions would then be available on the practice tests on the ColdFusion Certification testing site.
This would all be FREE and would only require generous people to give up a bit of their time and effort to help enter and review questions. Those who contribute on a regular basis would be in the "Contributors" section of the site where their efforts would be highlights and you could learn about who they are and what their company does.
Again, this is just a proof of concept to see if anyone would be interested in something like this. You can check it out now at:
http://www.bennadel.com/coldfusion-testing/ !! [NO LONGER AVAILABLE] !!
There are only a handful of questions at the moment, but more should be added soon!
Reader Comments
I like it! It's neat. What can I do to get involved? What i really want to know is how do you find time/motivation to do all this.
Boyan,
For starters, I am pumped up that you want to get involved! That is rockin' awesome. Secondly, my motivation comes from the fact that ColdFusion is such a bad-ass language and the ColdFusion community as a whole is just so awesome. Everyone is just so willing to help out... you can't help but excited about giving back to the community.
As far as time, I get up really early in the morning :)
To get involved, all you have to do is start submitting questions and / or reviewing them. To submit questions you need to write a question and give up to 5 possible answers (only SOME of which are correct):
http://www.bennadel.com/coldfusion-testing/question-setup.htm
Submitted question then get moved to the "need review" queue (same link as above). You can review questions there as well. One that happens, I just need to sign off on them (I didn't want to automate that step just yet to cut down on spam and crap being entered).
Thanks for your interest!
I am totally interested in this! This is a great app you've written here! you should dedicate a full on site to it!
Derek,
That's the idea eventually. I figured I would throw this out there to see if anyone would bit. If there was some interest and participation it would be fleshed out into a full site where people could post comments for questions and a discussion board, resources, and basically anything else ColdFusion certification related.
Glad you are interested. That is really exciting!
Whenever you have "Select 1 of the following answers:", all the options should have radio buttons and not checkboxes. should be an easy fix
I can code that up. Should be an easy fix.
Also... just an FYI to everyone, all the "Flagging Comments" get stored where I have access to them. They just don't show up anywhere on the site just yet.
This rocks!!!
Wow, great stuff so far! I'm working my way through the developer study guide and seeing how helpful something like this would be. I'll add some questions to help out!
Interesting idea, and nice execution. Might I suggest that you also include a facility for question difficulty ratings? I think it would be useful to see this in 3 places. What difficulty does the submitter think it is? The administrator? The end-user? (The last, of course, being a collborative average rating.) Such a rating system would not only allow you to grade each test, but also rate the difficulty of a test, as well as rate the skill level of the end-user.
Maybe a 5-level (er, 6-level) system?
0. Duh. Can you fog a mirror? (Corpse)
1. General Knowledge, you should definitely know this. (n00b)
2. Easy, you sould know this after a few weeks of playing around with CF. (Apprentice)
3. Moderate, you might have to think about this for a minute. (Journeyman)
4. Tricky, you probably would have to pull a book off the shelf. (Master)
5. Unfathomably Difficult, these are real edge cases and probably 99% of your pages will never use this. (Guru)
I could see some kind of dynamically-generated badge thing here. Finish a test with 50 or more questions and get rated as a 4.1 "CF Master". But if the myriad of other people think the questions are overrated and start to mod them down, so follows your rating. So, it's in your own best interest to submit quality questions and to answer the really hard ones.
Wow Ben, you would like some feedback on your CF questions?
I think they are pretty good, however, I liked them even better when I originally authored them for CFMX Exam Buster (http://centrasoft.com).
You completely plagiarized my product, CFMX Exam Buster! 100% identical, no attempt to even try and alter the questions/answers.
This page shows Ben's purchase date of CFMX Exam Buster and screen snapshots of "his" questions and screenshots from CFMX Exam Buster (which has been on the market for almost 6 years).
I spend a lot of time and effort putting together a very high quality product and make it available to the ColdFusion community at an extremely reasonable price.
CFMX Exam Buster has received many accolades and high praise from quite a few CF gurus and dozens of developers.
To have someone, such as yourself Ben, come along and completely steal my work is a complete slap in the face. Passing off my work as your own in a public forum such as CF-Talk and your public blog, and accepting praise from your fellow CF developers.
Shameful by you and damaging to me.
Sincerely,
Brian Simmons
author of CFMX Exam Buster
Brian,
I offer my deepest apologies for this. I have of course immediately removed the questions that I took from your testing. My intent was not to plagiarize. My intent was only to demo a few questions to get people excited about contributing. I wanted to get a community-driven application going where people would enter their own questions and review questions.
I have applauded and recommended your product in the past and I think it is FANTASTIC. Please accept my deepest apologies for this horrible error in my judgement.
I got to this site from cftalk and I don't want to defend Ben's posting of those questions (which was a bad idea). But, in one of the previous emails, he did mention that he got the questions off of a study guide. I really don't think he was trying to take credit for anything. I think he just wanted to see if anyone would be interested in the idea for the site. That being said, I think it's a neat idea, but unfortunately I don't know enough cold fusion yet to contribute.
