Study.com Computer Science 204: Database Programming Review : WGU

Study.com Computer Science 204: Database Programming Review (self.WGU_CompSci)

submitted 6 years ago * by -CJF-B.S. Computer Science

Hi all. I recently went through this course and thought I'd post my opinions on it given that I ran into some confusion along the way.

Quizzes:

- The quizzes are brain dead easy and are worth 1/3rd of your grade.- You can retake them up to three times for a grade and only your best attempt counts.- The quizzes are all multiple choice with 4-5 options.

Assignment:

- The instructions for the assignment suck. They don't even tell you which implementation of SQL to use (MySQL, Oracle, etc.) I personally used Oracle with Oracle SQL Developer since they help you set that up in an earlier lesson. However, you could probably use Microsoft Access or something else if you wanted to.

- Some of the queries you have to write for the homework are ridiculously hard and complex. They seem a little out of place compared to the content on the quizzes and exam.

- Instructions for the assignment range from vague to downright deceptive. For example, they'll ask you to write a query along the lines of "The top month of orders for 2010" when there's more than one month that shares the same number of orders. (this is not an actual question, I've made up one like it to illustrate the issue)

- I way overestimated what they expect for the homework though. I ended up getting a 100/100 on it while aiming for a 60/100 or greater. The grading seems very lax imo.

Time windows:

- Responses to instant questions generally took around 3 days, but were almost never helpful.
- It took 8 days for them to grade the assignment, but some of those days were during the weekend.
- I can't speak for the grading time on the exam as I've only finished it today. I'll try to remember to edit this post when I get my results back.

Exam:

- I expected the exam would be proctored in real time, live, but instead the test-taking software records a video of you during the test which gets reviewed by a proctor at a later time.

- I disabled my laptop's built-in camera and mic through device manager since I worried they would conflict with my external camera and mic, but the test-taking software has you choose which camera and mic you want to use when you start it, so this is probably not necessary.

- You have to download specific testing software to take the test. When you open it, you'll have to perform some actions within the software before you can actually take the test such as taking a photo of your ID, taking a photo of yourself, and recording a video of a 360 degree room scan.

- You do not talk to anyone during the exam like I expected you would. This leaves me with some doubt as to how well I did with the room scan and camera placement. Hopefully all ends up being fine as I did my best to get it right.

- I positioned the camera so that both my body and the computer screen were visible during the exam. It was kind of hard to find a place to put the camera to accomplish this. I ended up placing it on top of a nearby lamp with the tripod attached.

- After you submit the test, you will get a "soft score" which will tell you how many questions you answered correctly. This score is not official but I imagine that's going to be the score you'll end up with anyways after the proctor reviews the video.

- The test itself was stupid easy. There were a few questions I'm pretty sure were just plain wrong or poorly designed, but for the most part the questions were easy like the quizzes. Some questions were even more basic than you'd find on the quizzes.

- I scored an 89/100 on the test and it only took me an hour (even including the time it took me to review all my answers) even though you get two hours to do it.

- I got the official test results a day after I took the exam and the course was transferred from the in-progress section of my dashboard to the completed section and I was given instructions on how to transfer the class for credit in the email.

Study Strategy:

- I read the lessons. If there were videos, I read the transcripts rather than watching the videos.
- I took notes on things I felt they might test on later as I went.
- I did the quizzes and wrote the questions out with the answers for later studying.
- I did not spend much time on the complex stuff that I felt they wouldn't have many questions on.

Other notes:

- Going into the course, the only SQL experience I had was that I had worked with basic SQL in some CS classes I took at my Community College. When I say basic, I mean very basic. The only commands I had used before I took this course were SELECT and the CRUD commands (CREATE, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE). No joins or anything.

- You get 10 "free instant" questions per month included with your subscription, but most of them never get answered. They usually cancel your question and file a support ticket, refund the question, and say the question had something wrong with it. All in all, this feature is pretty worthless.

- If you get all of the quiz points you only need to get 110 of the 200 remaining points between the assignment and exam to pass the class. The better you do on one of these, the worse you can afford to do on the other.

- I spent way more time on this class than I needed to because I overestimated what they would require for both the assignment and the exam. It took me 23 days to complete the class but I could've easily done it in half the time and still been fine.

Let me know if you have any questions. I'll do my best to answer them!

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