Saturday, September 29, 2007

Tests @ ILP

Hi Friends,

First of all, thank you all for your contribution to the poll on the “Foreign Language”. 46% people want to learn French. German is at second place with 37% of votes. Spanish has been recently introduced in ILP. Not many people are interested in learning Japanese. Let me tell you that TCS is getting lots of Japanese assignments. Many Japanese associates have taken off to India and many of us will be flying to Japan for onsite assignments. So, if you get Japanese language to learn in ILP, don’t be disappointed.

Well, this article at last passed through my “Busy Schedule” filter. I received lots of comments, mails and scraps asking about the information on Tests @ ILP. So, I thought of sharing this information with you.

It’s been a year since I joined ILP in Hyderabad. There are lots of changes in the tests pattern since then. But at least you can have a bird’s eye view of the tests in ILP. Whatever I remember, you can find it in this article (I forget the things pretty fast). There is only one key test during ILP and that’s mid-term. After 25 working days, you have a mid-term test. This test would be on the technical topics and doesn’t cover the foreign language and soft skills. The test would be of total 50 marks and you have questions of a mixture of formats. For example, you have multiple choice questions, fill in the blanks etc. Each question carries marks based on the difficulty level. You will be made to sit in the allocated classrooms for the test and there’ll be one supervisor for each classroom (that’s obvious, isn’t it?). The mid-term test was open-book test in our times, but I heard recently from one of the associates in ILP that it’s no longer an open-book test (tough luck guys, now you have to study). The test would be simple. If your basic concepts are clear then it’s very easy to crack the test, in fact it’s “very difficult to fail”. (If anyone manages to fail, please let me know)

Mid-term test is very important (Why important? Wait, I’ll let you know). Don’t take it frivolously and do study to get a decent score in the test. The score of the mid-term test determines your rating in the first quarter in TCS. You have quarterly appraisals in the first year. These quarterly ratings are used to decide your confirmation rating (after completing a year in TCS) which in turn decides your annual increment (So, now you know why mid-term score is so important :-) If you get a rating of “5” in first 3 quarters, you’ll be confirmed in just 9 months (Early confirmation)

Apart from the mid-term test, you have loads of mock tests, small assignments, project stuff, presentations and much more. There are various self-tests to analyze your personality traits and to understand the business etiquette during soft skills sessions. You will enjoy tons of such exercises during ILP. I’ll publish few of them in my next posts. Tell then, enjoy and have a nice time.