As a developer who graduated from non-CS major, you might consider taking the ITPE with the same reason as I did. Therefore, I won't dig into that aspect too much and will get straight to the point (Btw, Thailand also holds the exam and provides the test in English. You can learn how to register for it in Thailand here, https://medium.com/@wichai.sw19/how-to-register-itpe-exam-in-thailand-3b999e7a07f8).
The FE exam consists of two parts, the morning session and the afternoon session. the first part covers a wide range of fundamental knowledges about computer engineering while the second half assesses pragmatic skills such as coding and designing diagrams. The questions are in multiple choices format.
At first glance, you might think that the second half is worrisome, but if you are a non-CS graduate, I assure you that the troublesome part is the first half. So, I will go with the easy one first.
The Afternoon Part: your day-to-day job
For the second half, while it takes some time to arrive with the answer, they're mostly your day-to-day job. If you have already gained experience for at least a year, it should be a walk in a park.
The questions mostly come with pseudo code. If you can code, it's just a reading comprehension to you. However, some basic concept might come in handy. Here're what I would suggest you prepare for:
SQL commands.
data structures: hash map, graph, tree, queue, stack, etc.
diagram designing: UML, use case diagram, ER diagram, flow chart.
bitwise operation (optional).
networking (optional): if you know about CIDR, subnet mask, and network switch, you should be more than fine, and it will also benefit some of the morning half questions. It's not that important for this part though.
Java/C#/C++/etc. (optional): they're not needed for the current version of the exam, but knowing languages that expose you to many programming concepts does help for pseudo code part. If your main language is JavaScript, you might consider learning how static array, dynamic array, list, hash map, thread, etc. works in other languages.
As I mentioned, if you have some working experience, this part should not be too crazy for you.
The Morning Part: A Cramming Hell
That's what I'd like to call this part.
While the questions are straight forward and have almost none that you have to adapt your knowledge, the scope of contents are excessively wide. It spans from hardware, networks, security, to business strategy and financial report. It even asks about corporate hierarchy your country doesn't adopt.
The questions are simple, but it's the kind of exam that if you know you know, but if you don't, there's no helping it. The challenge is that the exam really touches every topic a bit here and there. I can guarantee that.
Here are all the topics:
How to Tackle It
I'll provide you with the learning materials later, but before you're over-intimidated, I'd like to offer some help by sharing the approach I use to prepare for this exam.
Practice with the Past Exam
The problematic part has almost a thousand pages of learning materials and I had skimmed thought it with no avail. I find the best way to cram it is practice doing the past exam questions.
The answers they provide only include the correct choice without explanation, so you should try coming up with the explanation yourself. During this step, treat it like an open-book exam. Write down the explanations or calculation steps while noting the topics that are required to solve the problem. This will help you figure out that lacking knowledge of which topics make you unable to answer it correctly.
Proceed to the next past exam. Rinse and repeat. Your scores will get gradually higher with each round. Trust me.
After you've done around 3 exams you will find some patterns on how the questions on each topic will play out. Some topics like logic gates and binary conversion tends to show up more often than others.
This will drastically narrow down the content you might want to focus.
Knowing Which Calculations Need to be Learned
You'll find that there will be numerous formulas in the learning materials, but you surely don't need all of them.
If you know the Rule of Three you will find that questions on some topics such as system throughput, production capacity, and financial calculations only require basic math. You could just treat them as algebra problems, apply some math operations with the given numbers that makes the most sense in the context and you will arrive at the correct choice most of the time.
On the other hand, topics like finding out hamming distance, turnaround time & response time, binary conversion, CIDR (subnet mask calculation), and so on, require specific formulas or prerequisite knowledge about the topic.
After you had done the past exam, you will begin to notice that some topics relate to others. For example, you need to be able to convert decimal to binary and back to be able to solve CIDR or subnet mask problems, and you need to understand stack data structure to understand reverse polish notation. You might want to work a little harder on those topics since lacking the requisite knowledge will prevent you from solving the related problems too.
However, I recommend skipping some topics that require too much effort since you might have better chances at other topics.
Split Your Time into Chunks
Some questions may take you longer to answer because they require calculations, while others simply depend on whether you have seen the information before.
Since the exam require you to finish 60 questions in 90 minutes, completing 20 questions in 30 minutes will ensure that you'll be on time. Checking this every half an hour will remind you whether you're on the right pace or not.
I wish I could be of more help, but I think there's no real trick to it. The exam covers a bit of here and there from the reading material that you need to remember.
The mentioned approach just helps you find out what needs to be remembered for you, since everybody comes from different backgrounds.
The Learning Materials
For the resources I was talking about, there are the textbooks and old exam questions which you could find on the ITPEC site itself, but I'll guide you through that.
The FE Textbooks
This consists of 2 books, 'IT Fundamentals' and 'IT Strategy & Management'. You will need both books for the morning part of the exam. The document total around 900 pages, so you might want to make a schedule plan in advance.
You can get the books by:
1) going to this site, LIGHTBOAT (lightworks.co.jp).
2)Register your account then log in. You will be redirected to My page - LIGHTBOAT.
3) Click e-Learning then you will arrive at トップ - LIGHTBOAT (learningpark.jp).
4) Click on the left picture below to select a book then click anywhere in the panel on the right picture.
You will be on the reading player page now, but I suggest you download it by clicking at the save icon since the learning site allow you to open only one tab at a time.
The Past Exam Question & Answer
You can download questions and answer of all the past exam dated back to year 2007 from this link FE Past Examination Questions and Answers | ITPEC.org. The more recent the more relevant it is though.
However, the afternoon part from October 2023 and earlier wouldn't be relevant anymore because they change the format of that part.
The New FE Exam
Since April 2024, the FE Exam's format has been changed a bit.
For the first part, they only adjust the numbers of questions from 80 to 60, and also decrease time from 120 to 90 minutes, but the contents of the test stays the same. So there's no need to worry about the learning materials I provide you earlier.
As for the second part, the time is still 100 minutes, but the contents will be changed from 8 questions with multiple sub-questions to 20 smaller questions.
In fact, this format should be easier for developers, as all code questions use pseudocode instead of language-specific questions like Java or C++ and there also has no network-related questions unlike earlier exams.
If you can code and know a bit of data structures & algorithms, you should be fine.
You could find some examples of the new part 2 FE questions here FE-B-SampleQuestions.pdf (itpec.org)
And before I forget this, in Southeast Asia, apart from Philippines, you could also take the ITPE exam in Thailand too. You could find information about the exam in Thailand in this link. I must admit that it's not so English friendly though. You can follow this guide for a step-by-step registration process.
That should conclude it. I hope it could help you somehow. If you have any questions, feel free to leave some comments.
Top comments (0)