This is perhaps the hardest entry I’ve had to write so far. As you can tell from the title, I failed yesterday’s assessment by about 3 specs, with an overall percentage of around 73%. I’ve spent most of yesterday mostly reflecting on what happened and how I can improve on future assessments. Honestly, the stress is way too real right now, and I honestly don’t feel like writing much, but I’ll try.

I had the practice test down to a pat. I could finish it in 20 minutes, not counting the time for installing gems and setting up databases. And I believe I did the practice assessment a grand total of 7 times. I think that’s where my problem lays. I over-practiced the practice assessment. You’re probably thinking, “How the heck could you over practice?” Well, in this scenario, I think I pigeon holed myself into a mindset that had certain expectations for the assessment, so when the assessments had little twists or modifications from what I had expected of the practice assessment, I choked. The material wasn’t anything I haven’t seen before. I could do it, but apparently I’ve become susceptible to time pressure over the years. I used to be a really good test taker.

Back to the 20 minute practice assessments, I basically had it memorized at that point, and therefore, wasn’t really creating that flexibility in thought process needed to adapt to the various problems. That said, Assessment 4 is the hardest assessment yet or so I’m told, and with this assessment, it’s been made abundantly clear that you need to crank out the practice assessments, and basically do everything I was doing with the previous assessments. But after the assessments prior, I’m not too confident in the whole “just keep practicing the assessments” mantra. Anyways, a real quick summary on the work yesterday.

Yesterday was implementing what we learned about routes and controllers by creating a contacts list in which we could share. It was an interesting project, albeit a bit poorly explained, but the TA’s were great at answering any questions we had when the concepts seemed confusing. I think they could have honestly picked a different topic to implement the project. With terminology like ContactShare, Contacts, shared_contact, shared_users, etc., everything just seemed to wound itself up into a web of confusion for us while we tried to figure out how to properly setup rails and controllers. I feel like I understand the concepts and how to do it, the videos were especially helpful, and when we were creating the routes, I knew what to do. Today we’re going into views, so we’re really starting to tie everything together. It’s a bit hard to keep up, again that analogy of drinking through a firehose still applies, but after yesterday, I’m really struggling to keep positive, but I’ll keep at it. Thanks for reading guys, I’ll talk to everyone tomorrow.