What to expect during the exam - Illustrator Tutorial

In this video I would like to show you the tutorials that you will be greeted with when you are taking the exam so these won't actually be taking up the time allocated for your exam when you're doing it live so you get 50 minutes to complete 10 questions and 20 tasks but before even getting to those you will need to go through a couple of slides which just simply explains how the exam is going to work. Now the reason I included this video is just so you can familiarize yourself with these already even before actually taking the exam and I will walk you through these quickly first you will have a couple of things that they will ask about you it's more about your background and why you are taking the exam but then this is the slide that explains it well that you will have this first initial tutorial with a couple of slides then the first main segment of the exam starts where you will be asked questions so this segment will include 13 questions they are all multiple choice questions and if they want you to have multiple answers selected within a question that would usually be mentioned but most of the time you would just need to choose one answer. Then once you are done with that section you will be moving into another short tutorial a couple of slides about the next segment which is going to run directly in Illustrator. So that's the more exciting and interesting part where you actually have to perform tasks and once you're done with those you will still have the option to go back and revisit any of those tasks that you are not sure about but once you're ready you can just submit your answers and you will get the score report straight away. That's a great thing you don't have to wait around you will know exactly what your scores are. Now on this next slide we can see that you will be able to track how many questions you've answered so far out of all the questions that are coming up you will be able to keep an eye on your time the remaining time that's available and any question can easily be reset so if you quickly just want to go back to how it was before you made changes to it you can reset it this applies to both the questions and the tasks and probably the most important option here is the mark for review checkbox that you can check at any time whether you already completed the question or task or not. Checking this option is going to add a little flag and it will make it easier to come back to that particular question or task at a later time. So this is how it would look like when you get to the end of a section let's say the section about questions and there's the little flags showing or indicating which questions were marked for review later and by clicking on the questions here in the summary you will be able to quickly jump back to them and once you finish reviewing that question and you made sure that your answer is final then you can just go back to the summary which will take you back to this page and when all of your questions are done you can just say submit section. So that's going to finalize that first stage about the questions and you will move to the second segment or second part which is going to be about the tasks but first for the tasks as well it will give you a short tutorial a couple of slides and again explain where you can find the important elements within the user interface and for this part the exam will actually open up illustrator first and of course illustrator has to be installed on your computer for this to work and the exam will set the interface up in a way that you will see the certification questions on the right side in a dedicated panel so that's what we can see here and it will always give you the tasks there explaining what you need to do and on the left side you will have your document where you can work and the great thing about this part of the exam is that you are completely free to use whatever you want as long as you complete the task that they ask you, you will get points for it. Now it mentions that a few features will be blocked during the exam which is listed here at the bottom like the help option because they don't want you to learn about the features during the exam but you don't have to worry about these missing features because they won't be necessary to complete the exam. Now you are actually also free to move panels around and change the interface but if you ever want to reset it back to the way it was just go to the window menu choose workspace and then reset the certification test workspace. I recommend to dock the layers and the properties panels right next to the certification test panel and to keep these two always visible because these will mainly be needed to complete all of these tasks. So this is my recommended layout and then similarly to the questions during this task segment you will also be able to reset the tasks at any time, you will also be able to track how many tasks you already went through and how much of them we still left, you will also be able to mark any of the tasks for review later, you will be able to see your summary as well and in case you wanted to leave feedback about a particular task you can also leave feedback here. Now feedback that you give won't be considered for your final result it's more of a feedback that they can use to improve the exam if you have the time for that but I wouldn't worry about that most of the time. Now it's important to mention that during the tasks there will be a couple of them where you will also be able to click on exhibit to see the final result and that's always useful to check first before you even read the question because sometimes it just makes more sense what you need to create. On the left you will see your document, on the right you can check your exhibit and then once you see the before and after you will know already what to do. After that reading the question will make much more sense. Now whenever you see something underlined and set in bold and italic that means simply just by clicking on it you will be able to copy that text they just want to make sure that you can quickly put in any text that they ask you to use for instance for a layer or layer group or some other things like saving a file with a particular file name. Now there is an important thing mentioned here on this slide that you should always only do the things that they ask you to do and nothing else. So for instance if there is a dialog box where there's a lot of options and they only ask you to change maybe two or three of those then all the others should always stay the default value so don't mess around with anything else always only pay attention to what they ask you to do and you don't have to do anything else. Now once you get to the end of the task segment and you also made sure that you reviewed everything that you marked earlier on then you can just click on finish that section as well and with that you will be done with the exam and you will be getting your score report which will tell you whether you passed or not. So the required score is 700 which essentially means 70% and out of the 1000 points you will see your score just below that and on the bottom right corner you will see either a pass or a fail but most likely you will get a pass if you complete the entire course and you go through everything. But that is all you need to know about how the exam works so now hopefully you are eager to get started. So move on to the first topic and I wish you good luck preparing for the exam. I am confident that if you go through everything that we cover in this course you will nail it and you won't have any trouble passing.