Courseware needs an update.

I am planning on taking a cert exam and decided to go through the courseware.
After seeing that it's still on Unity 2017, I was wondering if I should ask for a refund, but thought it still might be interesting.
I think it's shameful how poorly the course is done and how outdated it is. We are paying good money and you are being shown a 5 year old software with tons of outdated material, depreciated APIs and things that are now done completely different. Because of the amount of changes, even some of the best practices are now not true. Pretty sad.

 

I'm not trying to hijack this post but I just completed the "Unity Certified Associate: Programmer" course and was a bit disappointed as well. I wouldn't really consider it a "course" as it doesn't really teach you anything, instead it gives you a description of tasks or "challenges" to complete. You then watch the solution video to see how close you got to what the instructor implemented, but then the instructor says things like "you may have done it a different way, and that's totally fine", so I'm left wondering what exactly I was doing taking this course. It was super easy to complete the challenges and it only took about a week to go through it (and I work full time). There isn't much substance to it, but it does (I'm hoping, I haven't taken the exam yet) give clues as to what you are expected to know & do.

Then I decided to drop more money and purchase the practice exam, which to my surprise was a bit difficult and I was not able to complete all the questions in the allotted time on the first go. This was more due to the questions taking too much time to understand and visualize what was happening in my head. There were bad typos that made some sentences nonsense, I don't know if this was by design or if the QA team was off that week. The problems you needed to solve were not that difficult or complicated but they were just poorly written and trying to unravel bad writing to understand the question takes time. Also the code was purposely formatted badly to make it hard to read. Some of the correct answers actually had mistakes in them that would never compile (having a . before a method declaration for example), again on purpose or no QA? By the end of the allotted time I was just picking out key words and ignoring most of the question and this seemed to work better.

The OP is correct about outdated info, the unity version you were supposed to use was 2019 and some things were deprecated, the courseware was pretty much a waste of money and probably just a cash grab for unity. I would recommend the practice test because I think it will give you a clue as to what kinds of tactics they will use to trip you up during the exam. Which brings me to a rant.

I am a hobbyist programmer hoping to turn it into a career. I have worked in IT for nearly 25 years so I'm familiar with "certifications." They consistently try to trick you into misunderstanding a problem to see if you'll fall for it and choose the wrong answer. This is a cop-out. Never once have I had a customer or client try to word a question or problem in such a way that I will misunderstand the problem and give them a wrong answer. Nor have I ever had a 30 second time limit to understand the problem and come up with a solution. These are tactics to make the test difficult with the intention to test your ability to find the root of a problem (I'm assuming) but really they are cheap tricks that have no real-world relevance and it's irritating. Give me a difficult problem to solve, not a specially crafted paragraph intentionally designed to mislead me.

TL;DR version: I don't think the courseware is very helpful either, it was outdated and didn't really "teach" you anything, it was pretty much a waste of money. The practice tests seem useful though.

 

Thanks for the detailed description of the courseware. I was considering buying the associate programmer bundle, but after reading your comments and those on the other threads, I think I'll save my money.

 

I just paid for the courseware and am shocked and disappointed how out of date it is! Thinking about requesting a refund, this is ridiculous. Were you able to get one?

 

In terms of courseware for the Certified Associate Programmer exam, I would say that this pretty much gets you there, and it is free. Link is to learn.unity.com's Junior Progammer Pathway. It is extremely well done.

 

My suggestion is that if you take anything just take the Practice Test. It is 90 questions which is not much use once you have completed it a couple of times because you remember all the answers but at least you can intuit what kind of questions you might get and the most useful thing about the practice test, see the solution and the explanation of why one answer is valid and the rest are not.

As for the coursware, it is a nonsense:
- Videos made with Unity 2017
- The explanations outside the video tell you to use Unity 2020 LTS.
- The tests in each topic have bad links to the explanations, they ask you about a certain API and then the explanation links you to lighting settings
- The author of the videos is proud of his good programming practices and the reality is that they are very questionable even though they are not relevant to the course itself.

Apart from the Practice Test if I had to choose a separate content that can help you pass the certification I would definitely choose this book (I have nothing to do with the author):

https://www.amazon.com/Unity-Certified-Programmer-techniques-certification/dp/1838828427

Apart from the fact that it prepares you in different chapters for the exam, it has tests per topic and a quiz of almost 100 questions.