Earlier today, I blogged about my preparation for the TOGAF 9 combined part 1 and part 2 exam, which should lead to me becoming TOGAF certified.

Now that I’ve taken the test, I just wanted to share some more experiences that might help people looking to do the same. I won’t say anything about the test content as there are strict disclaimers about that sort of thing – my post earlier today outlined my study/revision approach though (and it obviously worked as I passed the test) but here are a few extra pointers that might be useful:

• The 4-hour time slot includes registration, pre-post exam questionnaires etc. (on this occaision, those weren’t offered to me) and the actual exam is 150 minutes long (as the courseware tells us – I believe there are slightly longer sessions for those who don’t speak English natively).
• I found that I completed part 1 (40 questions, with a required pass mark of 55%) in about half the 60 minutes that are allocated but that didn’t give me extra time to use for part 2 (it’s still 90 minutes).
• All of the responses are multiple choice, and you can mark questions to go back review them at the end, before moving on.
• Confusingly, at the end of part 1, the only option is to “end” the exam – don’t worry, it does continue to part 2, even though it’s not clear that it will do so.
• Part 2 is only 8 questions (for which the required pass mark is 60%), of the scenario-type with graded scoring (5 points for best answer, 3 for next, 1 for the least-best answer, and 0 for the distractor). I needed all of that time with some questions requiring reference to the TOGAF manual (provided electronically, more on that in a moment). If you allow 5 minutes per question to fully read the scenario and understand what is being asked of you, that doesn’t leave a lot of time to search the TOGAF reference, so it’s better not to rely on it too much and to save that for when you really need it!
• I didn’t expect to get a score for part 2 immediately (at least not based on the advice from The Open Group) so wasn’t sure if I would get my part 1 score today either. Needless to say I was pleasantly surprised to find that scores were given for both parts 1 and 2 at the end of the test (a combined score on screen, and individual part 1 and part 2 scores on the test result certificate).

Prometric test centres have been dire since I first started taking Microsoft exams in the late 1990s (later I took some VMware ones too) but it seems nothing has changed. The test booking site feels like it was specified by the same user experience designers as the London Olympics ticketing site, with no ability to search for centres based on post code (I had to scroll through 5 pages of test centres, looking at each one to see if it was near me and had availability to book a test on the date I required). The centre I visited today had newer PCs than I’ve experienced in the past – even a widescreen monitor – but the software still looks like something from Windows 3.1 and the resolution was still 1024×768 (stretched, and spilling over the edge of the visible display!). That caused some challenges with the scenario-based questions (scenario on the left, answers on the right) – thankfully the keyboard allowed me to scroll as the on-screen controls were not visible…

Add to that the fact that I couldn’t even take a bottle of water in with me (some earplugs would have been nice too) and that the reference lookup of the TOGAF manual in the open book part of the test ran in an awful PDF browser that has terrible search facilities (and which crashed on me, requiring the test centre to restart the PC running my exam – thankfully back to the same state it was in before the crash!) – in all it’s not a very good user experience.

Hopefully all of this helps those who are less familiar with Prometric tests to prepare for their exam.  Good luck!

[Update: I just found some advice for those who are less successful – according to The Open Group, if you fail and you attended an accredited training provider, then you should contact the training provider for a retake voucher)