Reply To: Nemeth Certification
Hi,
I attempted the exam twice and did not make it. I successfully passed all 16 lessons of the Nemeth course through an NLS assigned instructor--you have to pass each lesson before you are allowed to go onto the next lesson. The course covered the math concepts well. I used to teach high school math so luckily the math concepts themselves weren't a problem for me.
But the course doesn't really cover the Nemeth formatting issues needed to pass the text.
I was praised by my grader how I did many complex math topics in braille correctly, but then I got the formatting wrong. My grader thought I was unusual but I think and have heard that my experience is common.
Who ever heard of taking a text covering formatting concepts you were not taught or exposed to?
For the past few months I believe, NFB was not letting anyone apply or take the Nemeth (and literary certification tests too) I was told. I think they may have been standardizing their grading procedures or restructuring the exams or something like that. I was told people can take the exams again now.
But what I found disheartening was the way the grade report is done. It's totally different from the literary test. Yes, they give you 1 chance to correct your 1st attempt, so that is why they can't tell you on which lines errors may have occurred (since you will be attempting to make corrections).
But then when you get the final report after you attempted to correct the 1st submission, you don't get told (like with the literary braille test) on what lines and pages of braille the errors occurred.
You just get told for example "Somewhere in this exam, this kind of error was made one time" and "3 times within the exam, this other kind of error was made".
It's just very hard to learn from your errors and see where the mistakes were when you don't get told what page and line the errors were on.
There were very complex triple integrals and all kinds of nested radicals and messy algebraic equations on the test, and it would have been nice to at least know if an error was made within a certain equation.
Basically you are just left guessing as to where your specific error occurred.