Halfway the brainbench campaign

Brainbench is free from 1 July to 14 July. This means that we are halfway right now. So it's time to make a short assesment of my test results. I have expected to score at 80 percentile in all tests and I would have been very happy with 90 percentile. But life is cruel. Here are the ones below what I have expected:

• 40% Business Communication (weak areas: electronic and nonverbal communication)
• 48% Listening Skills
• 68% Programmer/Analyst Aptitude
• 74% Written English (weak areas: articles, misused words, etc.)
• 78% Computer Fundamentals (Win 95/98) (weak area: win 95 :) )

Here are the ones of which I am content:

• 84% Technical Writing
• 85% MS Access 2000 Fundamentals

And there are some with really good scores:

• 92% C
• 93% Math Fundamentals
• 93% XML Concepts
• 97% Java 2
• 97% XML
• 98% OO Concepts
• 98% Programming Concepts
• 99% C++

The whole distribution is revealing. Most of the tests on which I got high "grades" (C++, XML, Java 2) are about knowing lots of information or.. knowing how to find it. I must admit that for the XML and Java tests I knew the answer for about 15% of the questions. However, 3 minutes were plenty to find the answer (usualy thru google). Note that this is not against brainbench rules. This probably means that I am good at locating and parsing information. The sadest experience was the score I got in the "aptitude test". This time the main problem was not the information quantity but rather how well you can handle it. And I did much worse than I expected. Most of the questions were relatively easy but I missed a lot of them feeling that I would have needed just a bit more time. But speed comes with practice so I guess this shows that I have exercised my problem solving skills not nearly enough. I have spent more time trying to understand masses of information organized by others, including problem solutions, but I have rarely sat down and tried to solve a problem by myself. I need to remedy this.