Naturally, it isn’t new, a lot of people (myself included) organize exams like that at the universities (and even some certifications are like that IIRC).

The problem with tests (IMO) is that they prefer people who learn things by heart instead of having a real understanding.

One example are questions like “how many reserved keywords Java has” which are quite useless (I heard the basic Java certification exam has questions like this).

Exactly! And this is where the difference is! We DO NOT have such questions! Moreover, we spent dedicated time to review Essentials and remove even so called recall questions as far as it makes sense. We now are developing questions for adv exams with a specially written style guide which has several other sophisticated rules and requirements. Around 70% of question will ask you either to analyze a code segment and make a statement about it, or complete a code sample.

That’s nice to know. Maybe I will change my mind about tests and decide to enter the exam at the next akademy (if you’re going to hold them like this year) :)

Vladimir wrote:

Exactly! And this is where the difference is! We DO NOT have such questions! Moreover, we spent dedicated time to review Essentials and remove even so called recall questions as far as it makes sense. We now are developing questions for adv exams with a specially written style guide which has several other sophisticated rules and requirements. Around 70% of question will ask you either to analyze a code segment and make a statement about it, or complete a code sample.

Vladimir, when advanced examination program will be started?

Well, I just took the advanced tests (in beta) last week at the Dev Days in München. Vladimir was right, a lot of the questions were about making statements on a piece of code. That was better than what I remember of the Essentials exam last year. Still, there were a few questions that required knowing something by heart that I thought was something that you’d normally just quickly look up in the docs. I can not be more specific on this public forum (you have to sign an NDA on the contents of the exam). Still, this happened less in the advanced exams than in the essentials one, and I don’t think it is much of an issue if you have sufficient exprience with Qt: you’ll make it anyway is my idea.

P.S. Turns out I was right before when I suggested I should start studying for this years dev days :-)