C/IL Exemption Exam Information

Important Dates

Who may take the exam?

• You can attempt the exam only once.
• You may not be registered for CIL 102 or CIL 104 or the correspoonding labs in the semester when you take the exemption exam. If you are registered for one of these courses, you must drop the course. If you drop the course in the first week of the regular semester you may be able to add another course to your schedule.
• You have not taken C/IL 102 or C/IL 104 and failed or withdrew from the course in any semester before attempting the exam.

How do I register for the exam?

• Attach the completed form to an email message.
• Make the subject line, "C/IL Exemption Form".
• Send the email from your Royalmail account.
• Send it to beidler@scranton.edu.

Further Questions

How the exam is administered

• The exam is given in two parts, concepts and skills offered on consecutive weeks.
• The Concepts part of the exam has a timelimit of 60 minutes although most students who should be taking the exam should finish this part of the exam in from 30 to 40 minutes.
• The skills part of the exam has a time limit of two hours. Most students who take this part of the exam take from 90 minutes to 2 hours to complete it.
• Concepts Exam consists of 50 multiple choice questions worth one point each and 10 short answer questions worth 2 points each.
• The Skills part of the exam will be taken in a computer lab and you will show your skills using a computer. Currently the exam is given using Windows XP, MS Office 2007, MSIE or Firefox for Web work, and the University's library databases.
• The skills part of the exam consists of 6 parts. The six parts consist of:
  1. Using Windows
  2. MS Word
  3. MS Excel
  4. MS Powerpoint
  5. Web searching
  6. Library database searching
• If you opt to do so in writing, before the skills part of the exam, you may omit the library database searching part of the exam and instead take (and pass) a short course in using the library's databases. This consists of attending the session(s) offered by the Weinberg Library faculty that they give to students taking the C/IL 102 course during the semester.
• If you decide NOT to take the exam after having signed up for it, you must notify Dr. Beidler in writing (e-mail is sufficient) no later than two calendar days prior to the administration of the exam. Failure to do so will count as an failed attempt to take the exam.

How the exam is scored

• You must pass both the concepts and skills part of the exam to pass the exam.
• If you don't pass the concepts part of the exam then you may not take the skills part of the exam.
• To pass the concepts part of the exam you must score at least 35 points on the multiple choice section and score 14 points on the short answer section.
• To pass the skills part of the exam you must average 70% on the six sections.
• You must also score a minimum of 50% on each of the sections of the skills exam.

How/what should I study for the exam?

• For the skills part you should go on line and find tutorials. For example if you want to brush up on Excel, just google Excel tutorial and try some of those.
• For the concepts part of the exam, the reference material for the C/IL 102 course is available on the Web Site http://www.cs.scranton.edu/~cil102
• Google computer literacy test or computer literacy quiz or something similar to find online tests.
• Go to a publisher's web site and look for student quiz files associated with their literacy text books.
• Find a friend who took the course last semester or last year and borrow old tests that they took and try to answer the questions on them.