In honor of the upcoming release of Win7 (“More Happy is Coming”—I love that commercial), I thought it might be fun to take a journey back in time and look at some of our earlier Windows client exams. Let’s start with Exam 030: Microsoft® Windows® 3.1.
It was interesting to read through these items and see what our item writing standards were at that time; they are very different than what we have in place today. Even more interesting was to find that many of the items on this exam were knowledge based questions, like the one below, rather than the application based questions (like #1 and #2 below) we write today:
Example Knowledge Based Question: Which command will result in a directory listing of all files in the current directory regardless of the file attributes?
A. dir /a
B. dir /o
C. dir *.*
D. dir /a:hsr}
The correct answer is keyed as A by the way.
-----
Now, let’s have some fun. Over the next four days, I’m going to post a few questions from different Windows client exams (Win95 on Tuesday, Win2000 on Wednesday, and WinXP on Thursday) and test your knowledge. The first person who responds with the correct answer (what we keyed as correct when this item was published) to both questions and briefly explains why it’s the correct answer will win an exam voucher!
The Windows 3.1 exam was released in August 1994. So, dig into your memory banks and see what you can remember.
------
Question #1. Assume that you want to change the default listing for the dir command to wide format and alphabetic order, without having to type the switches /w /o:a each time. How can you specify these options as the default for the dir command?
A. Add the command set dircmd=/w/o:n to the AUTOEXEC.BAT file.
B. There is currently no method to change the default display of a dir command.
C. Modify the MSDOS.INI file to include a dir_list=/w /a line in the [defaults] section.
D. Modify the DOSSHELL.INI file to include a display=/w /a line in the [options] section.
Question #2. Assume that you have run MemMaker on a computer without the MOUSE.COM version 8.2 device driver loaded into the UMA. The Microsoft MS-DOS mem /c command shows that a 24K contiguous block of memory is available in the UMA and that the MOUSE.COM file uses only 17K. The MEMMAKER.STS file contains the following information about MOUSE.COM:
[SizeData]
Command=c:\dos\mouse /c1 Line=1 FinalSize=17088 MaxSize=56928 FinalUpperSizes=0 MaxUpperSizes=0 ProgramType=PROGRAM
Why is MOUSE.COM not loading high?
^^^^A. The switch /c1 forces MOUSE.COM to be loaded into conventional memory.
^^^^B. The line MaxSize=56928 indicates that MOUSE.COM initially needs 56928 bytes to load high.
^^^^C. The line FinalUpperSizes=0 indicates that MemMaker has determined that the device will not function properly in the UMA.
^^^^D. MemMaker has incorrectly identified MOUSE.COM. The ProgramType=PROGRAM command should be changed to a ProgramType=DEVICE command.
We don’t have any stats on these items, so I have no idea if these items are good, bad, or ugly. What do you think? Too hard, too easy? Technically accurate? Clearly written? I know what I think from a psychometric perspective, and let’s just say I hope you see a noticeable improvement over the next four days, but I’m curious about what you think.
By the way, anyone remember taking this exam? I’d love to hear your stories.