6/4 - I passed!

It's true - somehow, I passed.

In taking inventory of how I felt about each question, there were 14 questions I felt really solid on, 5 I felt about 70-80% on, and 11 I was doing some degree of guesstimating on. There are 30 questions overall - only 25 count, but you don't know which 25. The passing score has been about 63% recently, but I don't believe they will release the passing percentage as applied to this exam until sometime in the future.

I spent the full 3 hours, and could have spent even more time. Many of the 14 were the type of questions I was used to, but a lot of those were worded very trickily. I actually went back and changed maybe 3-4 answers on those after rereading the question and noticing I calculated something that didn't quite match the wording.

There were a couple of questions that I could swear I was calculating correctly, but the answers I kept getting were not one of the available choices. In one case I just took the closest answer, and in another case I don't remember exactly what I did. I think I took the closest, but even running the numbers a few different ways I never got an answer that was one of the available choices.

So as I tallied up my feelings on each of the answers, I felt I would be close to passing. I figured even on the questions I was very confident on I probably had one math mistake, so depending on how good I was with the 70-80% confidence questions and how good I was with the guesstimate questions, I thought I had a chance to get there. By the time I got to the point where the "Congratulations" screen would come up, I was just kind of worn out and wasn't feeling much anxiousness about it either way. Once I saw that I passed, I let out an audible "Oh wow".

A funny side story: As was being checked out of the testing center, I asked the two women working there if anyone had ever hugged them on the way out. One said she had been hugged, high fived, etc, but the woman working on my data was kind of surprised by the question and said she had not. The more she thought about it, the more amused she was by the whole concept, and by the time I left she actually gave me a hug for making her day by having the conversation with her. I could see that she was very happy that I was trying to be engaging with her, and it was fun to be able to make someone's day by throwing them off guard like that!

The exam window for Exam 2 is Aug 19-25, or about 10 weeks away. I am going to start looking at the material in a day or two and see if I feel I can hit that deadline. I think I will be able to. The window to register for the exam ends July 8, so I do have some time to decide...