CLAD Exam

[Jim77215]

In about 24 hours I'm going to take the CLAD exam for NI certification. I had talked casually to our NI rep about this on the phone last week and was told I'd breeze through it with my experience. I guess, with that in mind I did not put any prep time in for the test until now, the night before. To be honest, after just taking the LV fundamentals exam online and the CLAD sample exam, I believe I've underestimated the prep time needed. Are there others out there that have taken the CLAD? If so, I'd be curious as to what you thought of the exam and how much time you spent preparing for it. Maybe I'm just spooking myself.

[Ben]

I suggest you get a good nights rest and trust your local rep.

I got grand-fathered in as a CLD so never took that exam myself. All of my rookies are required to pass that exam and most seem to pass on the first attempt.

Ben

[Bob_Y.]

If you do OK on the sample test on the web, you will do fine on the real one.  They are nearly identical.  If you are not doing well on the sample test, figure out the area(s) that you are unsure about and think you may need some help with and look over it (them). 

Somethings to study that are not easy to just pick up by learning to program is memory allocation and its associated efficiencies as well as data types and coersions.  These could probably use some review by most of us.

All in all, just get plenty of sleep and relax.

Good Luck!

Bob Young

[falkpl]

On the topic of CLAD and CLD, how version dependant are the exams.  I have used LV 4.0-7.0 but have not switched to 8.0 as of yet (I will over the next few months when I get down time).  Do I have to be well versed in LV 8.0 to pass either or both exams? I have 8 years of labview experience and figured I would take the exams when I get a chance to but now I am putting it off again.

[Ben]

"how version dependant are the exams"?

One word of warning to spare you the narrow escape that had saved me.

I was told I achieved the highest score ever recorded for the CLD exam when I first took it but only passed the re-certification exam by 1 or 2 percentage points!

Why?

Because the re-certification exam was taken on a LV 7 machine and I had customized my environment on the PC's I used every day to look and act like LV 6.1. Durring the exam, I had to deal with that silly auto-tool selection nonsense!

So....

Please practice using the version of LV that you will taking the test on!

Ben

[falkpl]

Thanks ben, this is good to know but not what I was hoping for, I will wait until I migrate to 8.0 in the spring and hopefully will be ready to take the exam shortly after.

[Jim from DME]

Just a final note.....I started this thread originally. I just got back from taking the CLAD at the Pearson test center. As I was reviewing my test, without about 10 minutes left on the timer, my computer, at the test center, crashed! Semi-chaos erupted with the proctor. Eventually they ended up sending some files off to Pearson central where they are going to try and extract my test data and submit it. As of now I don't know if they are really going to be able to do this and may end up just taking the exam over again.

[Ben]

So it looks there are two possible out-comes.

1) You passed

2) You failed but know exactly what the exam is like and will know what you have to do to get ready next time.

Ben

[LV_Pro]

Ben,
   You didn't take the minute or so to reconfigure to your familiar environment, like during the code off? A good friend of mine didn't  pass the CLD for that reason. As to whether they will be having the exam in a specific version, it may depend on the exam site. Where I took it (at one of the select integrators in my area) they had just set up  the computers, so they had 7.1 on them (last spring). They didn't have floppies on the computers, which possed a problem when we were to finish up as we were supposed to save the exam to floppie and put it in a sealed envelope to send to NI.  You definitely want to be familiar with the environment, much of the difficulty passing the exam has to do with the time available to complete the exam. Unfortunately, in their wisdom, NI hasn't made it easy to configure LV 8's  environment to resemble the old versions 😞 May help the newbies, but it definitley causes lost time for those of us who have gotten to "touch wiring" familiarity with the previous layout.

P.M.

[Ben]

The Pro wrote "You didn't take the minute or so to reconfigure to your familiar environment, like during the code off?"

At that time I had not memorized what I had to shutdown and how. I was using LV 7 with LabVIEW.ini settings I had read about on Info-LabVIEW.

While preparing for the CLA, I practiced using the "out-of the box" version of LV and memorized the "ctrl-right-click >>> Stop guessing" routine. I hope LV 10 does not introduce any other UI challenges.

Related musing

Coding is a lot like driving. You expect the clutch to be on the far left and accelerator on the far right. It would be a very bad idea to swap the brake and accelerator pedal positions. Switching from one version of software to another should be like getting into a car you have never driven before. I should not have to go back to drivers-ed to use a new version. Imagine, "Oh look, an accident, now how to do I bring up that search screen and should I search on brake or stop?".

Done musing

Ben