Sample Exam Solutions for Review

[JÞB]

@Jeff: was there a private message complaining about your feedback as I can't see any complaints about your fully justified feedback on here?

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No but, I like to remind posters that the feedback may be blunt when I have a chance.

[chosborne2525]

I'm planning to take the CLD in a month. I'm a bit nervous but I'm doing all I can to prepare. I just took my first practice exam which was the boiler example. I timed myself and stopped right at 4hrs. It's incredible how fast it goes by when you're deep into writing code. I had 2 hours left and I thought yeah I've got this, but right around 30min and 15min left I was in a panic for sure.

If anyone gets a chance to quickly review my sample solution and provide some feedback I would certainly appreciate it! Thanks ahead of time.

[Jacobson-ni]

Some things I noticed:

You need to have tip strips on all front panel objects.  Some of your VIs had no documentation, one of them did, just do this for all of them.  Default icon for main VI.  Add labels on your wires that are being passed through shift registers.  Don't let an entire case or event go without documentation (comments were overall pretty good).  Be careful with wires, I noticed a few that went through objects.

I'm not going to comment on functionality because I don't remember the prompt exactly and I am sure you know how well you did with that part.

[chosborne2525]

Thanks so much for the feedback! I really appreciate it.

[chosborne2525]

Just took the Sprinkler practice exam, let me know what you guys think. I tried taking it last weekend and didn't do so hot. I tried it again today and I've attached what I came up with after 4hrs. Thanks for the feedback ahead of time!

[billko]

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@chosborne2525 wrote:

Just took the Sprinkler practice exam, let me know what you guys think. I tried taking it last weekend and didn't do so hot. I tried it again today and I've attached what I came up with after 4hrs. Thanks for the feedback ahead of time!

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I can't open LV 2014 on this computer but I can tell you that you will surely fail if you don't enclose this in a project!

[Jacobson-ni]

Chosborne2525,

I took a quick look at your project for documentation and style as you should know how close you were for functionality. Here were a few things I noticed.

1. Put tip strips on the controls and indicators of you Main VI.

2. In the Run Selector event you have a sequence structure that is, as far as I can tell, completely unnecessary.

3. In your timeout case you are using a feeback node that seems to be carrying the same information as the shift register, why not just use the shift register?

4. There are some overlapping BD objects, a couple of times this happens when you are trying to keep wires straight going into the FGV.

5. I would try to keep structure tunnels on the left and right edges.

6. As mentioned above you should have this all organized in a project.  If I remember correctly you are given a project to start from so it is hard not to do this for the actual test.

Overall, I thought it looked pretty good.  Your block diagram does get pretty busy sometimes which causes a lot of wire crossing.  If you find that you don't have enough space on the block diagram remember you can move parts of your code into SubVIs to make room.

[chosborne2525]

Thanks billko and Jacobson for the feedback on the boiler and sprinkler exams. I will be more mindful of these things going forward.

I've just taken the ATM exam and it is attached. I made sure to apply the feedback I've gotten so far on this exam. It seems to me that the difficulty level from exam to exam isn't entirely consistent, which I guess is understandable. I found the ATM and boiler to be more straightforward than the sprinkler exam.

[Jacobson-ni]

Chosborne,

It's good to see that you tried a second exam and it really looks like you incorporated the feedback you were given.  I really only see two "big" mistakes (big being relative because overall I thought you did very well).

1. Make sure that the controls and indicators on your SubVI's front panel are descriptive.  Look at your read and write account file VIs and you'll see what I'm trying to get at.  In both of those VIs you have a wired FP object named array which is unhelpful if anyone wants to reuse that VI in another part of the project. It also has the unfortunate side effect that if you view the context help of the wire anywhere in the VI it will just tell you that it is "array".

2. This may just be my opinion, but I think you could use more comments.  My very general rule of thumb is that each case of each structure should have one comment explaining, at a very high level, what is supposed to happen.  I am a big proponent of Subdiagram Labels.

To address the second half of your post, the level of difficulty does vary quite a bit from exam to exam but remember, a large portion of the exam is something other than functionality. I think most people would agree that the ATM is the easiest/most straightforward

[chosborne2525]

Here's the final practice exam, the car wash. I don't think it was too bad. I feel like I've improved over the course of taking each exam. Thanks for all the feedback!