Part 3: Assessment Prep — Finishing Strong with LSBot
It’s time for the third article in our four-part series! If you haven’t read parts 1 and 2 yet, we recommend checking them out first. If you’re prepping for an assessment and particularly interested in this part, it can stand alone as well.
- Part 1: The First Pass — Lighting the Path with LSBot
- Part 2: The Second Pass — From Familiarity to Fluency with LSBot
In Part 1, we’ve conquered our first pass of a Launch School course. In Part 2, we made a second pass. Finally, we’re ready for the exhilarating stage of assessment preparation. It’s worth mentioning again that this stage showcases the most pronounced variations among students, influenced both by the specific assessment and individual learning styles. In some scenarios, a solid first and second pass means that assessment prep takes a day — other times, you might spend a month preparing for an assessment.
When we evaluate what students need at this stage to be able to make the leap into an assessment, we can narrow it down to three common points of focus:
1. Boosting Confidence
Especially in the first few courses at Launch School, many students find that uncertainty and low confidence stop them from taking an assessment. Often, students will have the skills to ace an assessment, yet they will put off taking it due to inhibitions. You may find yourself splitting hairs and diving down rabbit holes rather than taking the plunge and moving forward to apply what you’ve learned to bigger fish.
2. Increasing Speed
Many students lean heavily into the emphasis on precision and mastery at Launch School. This leads to excellent, thorough, and exact answers. However, when it comes time for an assessment, the focus shifts to trimming down the time it takes to answer questions or develop code solutions. Now that you have a solid understanding of the material, the goal is to refine your ability to extrapolate key points and deliver them effectively within time constraints.
3. Sharpening Skills
Though the Launch School curriculum provides a plethora of exercises, it’s not uncommon that students still feel they need more practice before jumping into an assessment. While you can explain concepts, you might still fumble when it comes time to update code. Maybe you feel great about all of the practice problems provided for a 119 coding challenge interview, but you still aren’t satisfied with your level of fluency. Whatever the reason is, you may need more practice.
You may not feel the need to focus on all three of these areas, but chances are you’ve identified room for improvement in at least one of them during your assessment preparation. Let’s explore strategies to strengthen these skills and help you move confidently toward assessment day.
While the strategies discussed in parts 1 and 2 can certainly be utilized for assessment prep, we’ll now focus on using LSBot for content generation. If you make it to the assessment prep stage and have utilized all Launch School materials yet still feel unprepared, utilize LSBot to create content and critique your responses.
Written Assessments
Let’s look at how we might be able to use LSBot to generate content to practice for a written assessment. We’ll use the PY101 course as an example:
For brevity, we’ve only requested a single problem, but feel free to generate multiple at a time. Taking these questions and answering them on your own is great practice. Even better, though, is to send your answers back to LSBot. You don’t have to provide any further prompting if you don’t want to, but adding some guidelines can help LSBot focus on what’s important:
If you want, you can even generate an entire mock assessment. It’s important to know that LSBot has never seen the Launch School assessments. This ensures that it doesn’t accidentally share assessment questions but also means that you’ll need to judge the quality of the mock assessments it provides. Here’s a prompt we might use to prep for the RB129 Written assessment:
Interview Assessments
Content generation for interview assessments can vary depending on the assessment. For a 109 interview, the questions are very similar to those on the 109 written, with the extra challenge of answering verbally on the spot. Setting timers to answer these questions or recording yourself answering them can help to stimulate this pressure.
For a coding challenge interview, like the 119, 216, and 221 interviews, content generation is relatively straightforward:
Project Assessments
For take-home projects like those in the 189, 229, or 239 assessments, you can generate ideas for different practice projects. Give LSBot some guidance and ask for a list of requirements:
With all of these techniques, remember that you can create several iterations. If the content LSBot gives you is too easy, too hard, not on topic, or not in the correct format, give LSBot that feedback and try again. It’s easier to refine existing content into what you want than it is to get it perfect the first time.
Ultimately, the best way to use LSBot at any phase of your Launch School studies is the way that keeps you the most engaged and leaves you with clear mental models and the ability to express them on your own. LSBot isn’t a replacement for peer study and TA feedback, but as we’ve seen over these three articles, it can undoubtedly help enrich your studies and make better use of your time.
If you’re interested in more ideas for using LSBot, check out the LSBot User Guide, which contains best practices, prompt ideas, and information about where to find and use LSBot.
Happy studying — see you Wednesday with Part 4!
