Dred

There is no way this test is going to have a high amount of people scoring a perfect score. That is how tests were in the past, but the conductor 6601 test was not like this at all. I took two FDNY tests, the older one was so ridiculously easy everyone got 100, but the 2nd one was much harder and not everyone got a perfect. They probably want to change the system here so not everyone scores 100. That is a good point about the army vets. Maybe that is another reason they made this a lot harder so that just because you're an army vet doesn't guarantee you the job.

Will be interesting to see what we all get on this exam. make sure you guys post your scores so we can get an idea how the scores fall. I am pretty sure I will get close to 100 on the exam. To be honest, It probably doesn't matter all that much that it was harder because they only pick, for example, the top 1000 sores, so I would think the scores may just be distributed differently. Instead of a thousand people getting 98-100 a thousand people will get 90-100. What I personally like about the harder test is it guarantees me to be picked first before others and also guarantees that like 2,000 people won't get 100 and I won't be picked because they only choose a thousand people with the 100. What I also wonder about is if English was not your first language you would have no chance with this test. It was just too much reading comprehension and you had to be a very good reader. I always thought that the city was trying to get foreigners (not American born) on the payroll. Especially the Hispanic community. Maybe that was the purpose of the test to keep them out so that American born people would get the job. Or maybe they wanted to make sure conductors spoke good English.

transitnyc, that is a very good question why I wouldn't work as a CPA, because there is a pay cut. Part of the reason is I didn't really work much during the last 10 years, just enough to get the experience required to become a CPA. I traveled the world instead. I didn't want to work and waste my youth working. I am happy I made that decision, because as I got older, traveling isn't as fun because you can't meet people as easy being older. Being younger and traveling allows you to meet lots of university students from around the world. Now that I am pushing into my late 30's and don't have much work experience, getting a job in the private sector will be difficult. In a way I can consider myself having almost no work experience as I only have worked less than 2 years in the last 15 years. The other issue is working in a office is not fun, it tends to drive me crazy to be stuck in an office surrounded by the same miserable people. Office work seems to make everybody miserable because it is miserable work you do. I can't stand going to work every day in good moods to be around people is always bad moods. These people just don't want to admit that working in an office sucks. I also realize I have a NYC or Staten Island work mentality. This means I don't want to do any additional work and when 5:00PM comes around I want to go home. My last job as an accountant had all these idiots who would stay 2 hours late and come in an hour early to try and look good to the boss. I can't get myself to drop to those levels to get ahead. So a city job it is for me, where everybody has this city work mentality of pretty much only doing what is required of you. Where everybody accepts that you don't stay late if you are not getting paid for it. Where you don't have bosses always worried about the profits. City job is where it is at these days, especially since they really are getting overpaid for their work compared to the private sector. In the past the private sector paid a lot more, now anymore. With the benefits you get and the more relaxed work atmosphere, you can't beat the public sector. Even someone like me who is a CPA is better off working for the city, and trust me I have calculated the numbers and factored in quality of life and promotions. Jobs like the NYPD or NYFD with their 20 year half pay retirement is like winning the lottery. That is so much money as you don't get pensions anymore in the private work sector.

I have good achievements because I am a good test taker, I never said I was a good worker or anything else. I only listed my achievements to show you that I was a good test taker as you have to be a good test taker to achieve them. Listing my test taking achievements was very important to support my opinion of it being a difficult test. I don't know why you guys care what I say my achievements are on the forum. Who cares? You won't ever know me personally unless you also got a 100 on the test, . If someone came on this forum who said he was a Medical Doctor, I would just be like why the heck are you taking this conductor test if you are a medical doctor. I would not even think to tell him not to list his achievements, I would actually find it quite interesting to know what other peoples achievements are if they are worthy of mentioning. I wouldn't mind knowing who my competition was. Remember, you have to be competitive to get the job, that is what we are all after here isn't it? All that being said nobody ever mentioned when the test results would be available, my proctor surely didn't at the test date. Maybe someone listed them on this forum already, but I didn't go through all 30 pages to find them.

It took me also about 2.5 hours to complete all the questions, which only gave me about 30 minutes to check over some I have specifically marked. What I do is go through the test and skip any questions that seem difficult or will need extra time, I do this not to spend too much time on any question. There was a few of these surprisingly. I then come back to these questions. I also skipped a couple questions that were complex because It seemed that I was starting to panic at one point in the test and my mind went blank. There was so much information to go through, and you had to be extra careful. Even when I found an acceptable answer, I still went through all the other answers looking for why they were wrong. This added a lot of extra time. I agree with you 100%, if you finished before 2 to 2.5 hours, you probably didn't score close to 100%. Lots of people left early in my class. Only 3 people waited to the very end. This is a very good thing that the test was difficult, this means I am almost guaranteed to get 100% on it while most people will not do so well. The last thing I want is 3000 people who got 100 on it. I am pretty confident I got 100% of them right, I did not have to take a guess on any. However, I always seem to make about 1 stupid mistake per test, but I should definitely have a high list number. Unless they throw a lot of hard questions out to make it easier for the people who scored badly. I don't think they will do this because all the questions were fair, except the one with two answers. I'm not saying it was hard in that I couldn't answer the questions, I am saying it was a hard test because there was so much to read and figure out in such a short time. We'll see how everybody does. Anyone have an idea when the scores come out or we can check our answers?

Y2Julio, I think they are making the tests harder. They did it with the FDNY test, the 2nd one was much more difficult. The 1st one was so ridiculously easy, No way you would finish this one in less than an hour, the questions were very long and detailed. Each one was like that. Hopefully I'm not too overqualified, I am looking forward to the job. I can't work in the private sector because of a stupid disability I developed at a later age so am forced to take a city job now. City is the only place that will hire people like me. However, It is hard not to feel overqualified when you are a CPA and have a masters in taxation. I hope that is understandable. I'm being investigated by the FDNY right now, passed everything except background investigation, if that is passed I'm going to the FDNY. I love the subway and like being down in the tunnels, so would be looking forward to a job as a conductor. You can't beat the FDNY though, so that will be my 1st pick. This will be backup.

Thanks for the responses from the people who didn't find it all that easy. One of the reasons I posted my qualifications was that I do feel over qualified for this job, highly overqualified, and I was very surprised to find how difficult the test was considering the pay and the fact you only need a high school diploma. I believe I may have figured out why so many people found this test easy. I think the reason was that it wasn't asking questions which we wouldn't know, they didn't ask who the 5th president of the United States was. The questions they asked you could usually find an answer or think you are choosing the correct answer, but in reality you are choosing the incorrect answer. You had to be very careful not to make any mistakes. For example, to show you how careful I am on tests like these, I go through every answer even when I think I found the correct answer. I do this to make sure I do not make any stupid mistakes. This was very time consuming on this test because of how complicated the questions were. I felt like I was working at a very fast pace and still only had enough time to finish. Maybe I'm wrong guys and we all scored well and I am just over thinking it. I guess we will see when we can check our answers. I have noticed that the last FDNY city exam was much harder than the one I took prior that was thrown out. It seems they are making these tests harder, and putting in a lot of tough questions with a lot of reading. I think they want to make sure we are all good with the English language. I still can't believe how many people were finishing the test early. If you want these jobs you have to be 100% certain you didn't make any stupid mistakes in this economy. By leaving early there is no way you were making sure of this.

Trying to let you know that this wasn't an easy test and I have the qualifications to back up my opinion. Trust me, I'm not here bragging or I would be saying it was an easy test and still give my qualifications. You need to get every answer right in order to be called from the list on these exams. Too many people here are saying it was easy and underestimating it. Yes, maybe everyone pass, but that means nothing. Getting 100% means everything. I wish more of you said it was harder so I would have used my time more effectively. I still can't believe how difficult they made it considering a university education is not even needed. Yes I over react and over think things, that is exactly why I do well on these tests and have the qualifications I have. Did you read them, please do so again. You need to over think and over react to take these tests seriously to score well enough to get called. The question with 2 answers wasn't even a tricky one, it was obvious they had to have made a mistake on that one. Didn't waste time on that one, but I did look closely for a trick which I didn't see any.

I Just got finished taking the conductor 6601 exam. I went into it thinking it would be easy based on what almost all of you have said here about the exam. I found it to be actually quite challenging. I easily took the whole 3 hours, and could have easily used another 2 or 3 hours to check over my answers. I am at a loss on why I found it difficult while most of you found it easy. While there were some easy questions, there were also many challenging questions. Now do not get me wrong here, all the information was on there to answer the question correctly, you just had to really use your head, which I didn't expect on this exam. I found a large amount of the questions tricky, you had to be extremely careful with many of them. If English was not your first language then there is no way you are going to do well on this test. What I think is that many of you underestimated the questions, many of them were designed to slip you up if you were not careful. While they may have seemed easy to find an answer, you may have been tricked into choosing the wrong one. I panicked with time at certain points, and had to skip whole questions for later because my head was hurting and couldn't do the thinking required to do them. This to me is just crazy on an exam for a conductor. Because so many of you said it was easy, I was taking my time in the beginning when I should have been rushing through the easy ones to spend more time on the harder ones. To make everything even more surprising, I went back and checked some I marked before I ran out of time. I actually caught a mistake on one and couldn't believe I got tricked, I almost never change answers with my final review. This was really a difficult test. I can not see how so many of you found it easy. What I have found from experience is that tests I have found difficult, I normally always have scored much higher than the people who said they were easy, and many times scored the highest grade in the class on those exams. Your first thought is going to be, I'm probably just stupid and that would be totally OK. Please let me tell you my qualifications. English first language University degree in accounting with a 3.9 GPA in major. Masters degree in taxation with a high GPA around 3.7, I actually forgot what it is. I am a CPA, (certified public accountant), so yes I passed that very difficult exam, ask anyone who has taken it, harder than the exam to become a lawyer. For other city tests I have taken, I only took the last two FDNY city tests, scored 100 on them and scored a very low list number, easily got called for both of them. The 1st FDNY test I took I found that to be extremely easy, the 2nd most recent one was much harder. I consider myself a very good test taker, very careful and have scored the highest grade on many exams in my classes at the university. I am an extremely careful test taker, I have lots of work experience in taxes where being careful is a priority. That being said I am sure I scored close to 100% on this test, but to say it was easy is totally an understatement. Please, is there anyone here who will admit that the test was also quite challenging? I honestly feel so stupid right now that I am the only one who found it challanging.

That would be the smart move. However, it is so easy to drive over from Staten Island if there is parking around the school. It looks to be highly residential around the school so I assume I can find parking someplace. Mapping with google taking public transportation would have me taking 1 hour and 43 minutes each way. So almost 4 hours for a 13 mile car ride if I took public transportation. Hopefully traffic is light at 7:30 when I would drive over Sunday morning.

Hi, I have my test this Sunday at 9:00AM at James Madison High School. Does anyone know if I will be able to find free parking at that time? I have no problem walking a couple of miles if I have to. Or should I not chance it and take public transportation. Thanks.

Hello everyone, I am scheduled to take the conductor test this week and have a couple of quick questions. Is there anything I should study for or brush up before taking the test? Thank you