Passing Score

Day 226 of writing every day.

After spending about a month studying and preparing for the IT Passport exam, today is the big day.

I went and took the test at the testing center it’s held at near Tenmabashi station located inside a large building known as OMM (Osaka Merchandise Mart). It’s a well-known office building and shopping center of sorts and quite a few companies have their offices set up there.

Despite printing the exam ticket, I didn’t bother reading the fine print until today at the bottom to check that they open thirty minutes before the test begins and suggested examinees arrive twenty minutes prior to. I was already planning on giving myself plenty of time to get there in case of train delays, so it was good knowing I didn’t need to wait outside for long and could just be ready and waiting.

The test is 100 multiple choice questions long and examinees are given two hours to finish the test. This is all publicly available information but, all belongings have to be kept in a bag and in a locker outside the testing room. Everyone gets a pencil and scratch paper to take notes and draw things out to calculate or visualize problems that involve some logic and math.

I ended up using the full two hours and didn’t know how some ended up finishing early, that is unless they decided to throw in the towel or something. I didn’t have the confidence to just answer and move on quickly. I needed to make sure I read the question correctly and if any keywords were present. The answer one might select after glancing over the question casually versus giving it a good look can be the difference between failing and passing when they all add up.

In the end, I didn’t get a chance to review the answers I put down but I did reach the end of the test while having skipped two or three questions that looked to be more time than points they were worth. Some questions required at least a minute for me to read and wrap my head around what they were asking for and what they were referring to with the information provided. With 100 questions to answer in 120 minutes, that gives you an average of 1.2 minutes or 72 seconds to read and answer each question.

Some questions were quite similar to the practice questions as I hoped, but some had content that didn’t show up in the study materials—which I believe never intended for users to get a perfect score, but only cover enough to pass.

I ended up getting a solid 690/1000 overall score with 600s out of 1000 for each section. The passing requirement is 600/1000 overall and at least 300/1000 for any section (so examinees aren’t neglecting any of the sections when studying for the test). That means I met the requirement to pass the test, but nothing is official yet. The results will come out a month later, so I have to wait until August to be accredited with a certificate of passing the exam.

Well, at least it’s one goal achieved and something less to deal with now. I’ll be moving on to do other things with my time, notably coding and covering things I need to be able to do to become a frontend developer, or take on whatever project I can get when I start working.

Thanks for reading!