Yay! We're super excited that you'll be arriving soon! We have some practice work before you take your first assessment. Read on!
You may have already done the practice problems for the second coding challenge. If not, check them out. Assessment00 will ask you to solve four such problems in the time period of an hour, so these are good practice. The practice problems are a little harder than those on the assessment, because we want you to over- rather than under-prepare :-)
The Sunday three weeks before your cycle begins, we'll open the window for taking the first assessment, assessment00. As with all our assessments, the exercise is timed (1hr). We'll send you a link to a website, you can request the assessment through the link, at which time we'll begin timing you.
You'll have eight days to request and complete the assessment; we'll close the window at 12:01 AM Monday. We want you to complete it two weeks before class begins so you have time to further prepare if necessary.
Please do not share or discuss the practice problems with other students until the course begins. The assessment is for the students' benefit; it is designed to let incoming students know whether they are prepared for the class. In a sense, it cannot be cheated; underprepared students who don't get help early hurt their chances of completing the course successfully.
The assessment mimics the practice problems: it consists of four problems and their accompanying test specs. Your job is to get the specs to "go green" and pass (just like with the practice problems).
So dive into the practice problems and good luck!
Completing assessments successfully is really important in providing you feedback and helping you to track your progress through the course. They are meant to help by letting you know how you are performing in the course.
Assessments are very important; students are required to pass them. We want everyone to be successful here, but we also don't want a student to fall behind to the point where the course is no longer helping them. If the program is not working for a student or they get to the point where they can't pair with other students, we do want them to find another environment where they will be successful.
For that reason, students who fail an assessment will need to make up the work to keep up with the rest of the class. Students who fail two assessments will be asked to leave the program.
Ideally you will all ace the first assessment. However, if a student does very poorly, we will probably want to talk with them about whether they are prepared for the class. The main thing is that we don't want people to start out already behind; the class accelerates quickly, so we really want everyone to be properly prepared.