I am still trying to shift my sleep patterns back. It is still early but I could not sleep. I am starting to get a better picture of the story around the test. I have gotten email from the others that they have now finished there tests. Up to now they have not heard from me. Besides they have not seen my website nor my blog. As I said I got email from one of them yesterday evening. I think that it is probably ok to discuss parts of the test with him now that he has taken it. I want to know if he took a test that is more like the tests in the past or a test more like the one I just took that is completely different. The test that I just took had several questions that I have learned now were not on the reading list. In fact one of the questions on the test A*P comes from a different era of software engineering not covered by the books and papers on the reading list. So I have put the questions to the guy that says he has taken the exam. Even if he comes back and says that the exams were similar I still believe it was unfair because of the questions that were not on the reading list. I know of at least 4 parts that were not on the reading list. These were either whole questions are parts of questions. One question that was on the reading list was combined with another to make it longer than it was in the past. Another that was on the reading list was more complex. The test was very different from the point of view of complete-ability, complexity, and material. The material is the one that makes me most upset. I can understand how shooting sprees like the one in the news now gets started. I don`t condone that king of thing but I understand how some nut being treated unfairly does something awful like that.

I have now looked up all the material that I remember from the test that seemed out of place. I now definitely know that they were not on the reading list. I will know sometime today if these questions were just for me or not. I don`t know what good this does for me but DePaul Reputational Risk was never a concern. I have only wanted to make the program better. I have been completely honest. To spring something like this on me was not honest. Integrity, integrity, integrity, lets have some integrity. If I had had a book on the reading list with this information, I would have read it. Even if I did know something about each and every one of these before the exam I would not have prepared in-depth for them because I did not think that I would be tested over them. As I have said before people get out of the masters program, and PhD for that matter, all the time without knowing the difference between Moore Machines and Mealy Machines. Did I expect to have them covered on the exam, No. I did expect to have to draw state machines with UML. I do this in my job. I expect to do this well, it has been in a past exam. Change the reading list if you expect to ask questions about a different area of Software Engineering. I did notice how a good deal of the questions that were not on the reading list were language questions. That was a different flavor than the information on the reading list today. Most of the information on the reading list is language agnostic. The "Java Programming Language" book is only about basic constructs. Would you expect to get language questions, no. I would only expect to have minimal OO language questions. Some of these questions I mention were labeled architecture questions. Ah, another overloaded term architecture. The quote from the book, "Software Architecture encompasses the structure of large software systems. The architectural view of a system is abstract, distilling away details of implementation, algorithm, and data representation and concentrating on the behavior and interaction of "black box" elements. A software architecture is developed as the first step toward designing a system that has a collection of desired properties." So, these questions are not architecture questions even though some of them were labeled that way. They are not part of design either. They may be related to tool design but not to system design. OO analysis and design lend themselves to OO languages better than procedural languages but I would think, though it crazy, you could do OO analysis and design and end up using a procedural language. If they were architecture and design questions would they not come form the architecture and design section on the reading list. Design Patterns, SEI software architecture, RUP, Scenario architecture analysis, and a pre-RUP about RUP paper were on the reading list. It does not seem that these would cover O***/C*** P**** in OO design, and in fact they don`t. They don`t cover A*P either. The don`t cover the F****** B**** C**** problem either. I would not expect to have them on the exam.

It still remains to be seen what will happen. I don`t think anyone is visiting my site yet.