Cognizant Certified Student (CCS) Program FAQs

In todays fast-paced world, technology is a shifting goal post. What seems cutting-edge now, can become outdated in no time. Training and skills upgrading are therefore critical to growth. To keep up with rapid technology changes, professionals must have a sound and clear understanding of key concepts. The Cognizant Certified Student (CCS) Program seeks to help you strengthen and test your knowledge of subject fundamentals in order to boost your employability and relevance to the IT industry. How will this certification help us? We see a Cognizant-certified student as one with a deep and clear understanding of the concepts and fundamentals of the chosen subject. The certification will be a quantifiable indicator of your job-readiness in the IT sector and you will enjoy an edge over others during placements. Is it one single assessment encompassing all subject modules? Yes. It is a single assessment that will test the students knowledge of fundamentals in areas such as Data Structures, OOPS, C++, RDBMS and Software Engineering. The student will be awarded a certificate on clearing the assessment. Who is eligible to take this certification? During the pilot phase, the certification is open only to pre-final year (2013 batch) UG / PG students of CS & IT departments including MCA and MS Software Engineering of select institutions. The students should possess 60% aggregate consistently in Class X, XII, UG and PG (if applicable) till the semester for which exam results have been announced. This certification is not open to all students, nor will students be able to take this up after passing out of the college. Is it mandatory for all students to take up the certification? This is only an optional certification program from Cognizant. What will be the assessment pattern, duration and passing criteria? The assessment will comprise objective type (multiple-choice) questions and will be for a duration of 90 minutes. The minimum passing score is 60%. Only those students who score 60% or more will be issued the certificate. MODULE Data structures OOPS & C++ RDBMS Software Engg Total NO. OF QNS 30 30 30 10 100

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Will the questions be restricted strictly to the sub-topics provided in the table of contents? Nearly 80% of the questions will be from the topics mentioned in the table of contents. Will the students be provided any training prior to taking the certification? Cognizant will NOT provide any training. Students are expected to study on their own and take up the assessment. The list of modules, their sub-topics along with a list of books have been provided along with this FAQ document that they can refer to during self study. How many attempts are the students provided to clear the assessment? All students have only ONE opportunity to clear the assessment. Is there any cost involved in taking the assessments? No. This is free for students and the college as Cognizant is rolling this initiative out as part of our corporate social responsibility initiatives. What is the registration process? All interested students will have to register through the Placement Office by the mentioned date. Cognizant will then share the unique Username and Password details to the students on the date of the certification exam. Will the dates/timings be worked out taking our semester/college exams into consideration? We will share the exact schedule of assessments as per the dates confirmed and we will indeed take into consideration the broad University examination schedules (though not college-wise). Where will the assessments be conducted? Based on the availability of appropriate infrastructure, the assessments would be conducted at the respective colleges itself or at a prescribed vendor location. Details of the same would be communicated two weeks prior to the assessment date. When will the students know the results of the assessment? When will we receive the certificates? The student will get to know the result immediately after taking the assessment. However, the certificate will be issued within 45 days of clearing the assessment. Is there any benefit to the student on clearing the assessment? The certification is a quantifiable indicator of their job-readiness for the IT sector. Hence students who clear this certification will be eligible directly for Cognizant Technical & HR Interviews during the campus recruitment program (and will not be required to appear for the Cognizant Written Aptitude Test). Two top scoring students of the college will be rewarded with a 3-month final semester project work / internship opportunity with Cognizant. Who do we get in touch with for queries related to the assessments? For any further queries, please reach out to your Placement Office

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Dates to Remember Nominations to be submitted to the College Training & Placement Office by 31 Dec, 2011 Finalization & Communication of examination dates by 20 January 2012 Exams to be scheduled between 1 & 15 Feb, 2012

List of Topics & Reference Materials

DATA STRUCTURES Queues Stacks Linked List Trees Sorting and searchin algorithms Array Graphs REFERENCES C & Data structures - Balaguruswamy Data structures using C - Tanenbaum

OOPS CONCEPTS REFERENCES A Look at OOP An Introduction to OOPS using C++ - Peter Muller Distinction from procedural approach Incremental development - prototyping Class Hierarchy/Relationship definitions Data Abstraction/Dealing with the data in the real world terms Economy of expression Extensibility Reusability Why to use the concept of classes Dos and Donts of Polymorphism How actually does a language implement Polymorphis Static Binding v/s Dynamic Binding Why use Polymorphism C++ Arrays and Strings C++ as better C/Inline functions Classes and Objects Closure Classes/Constructor and overloading Constructor and Destructor Conversion Data Structures Friend Functions Memory Management Virtual Functions Abstract Class Version 1.0, November 2011 REFERENCES C++ concepts - Yeshawant Kanetkar

Enumeration Files and Streams Implementing OOPS in C++/Inheritance Polymorphism/Fundamentals RDBMS Introduction to Databases Constraints and Keys SQL/Creating Tables SQL/Joins SQL/Nested Queries SQL/Functions Codds Rules ER Diagrams Locking Normalization RDBMS vs. DBMS Relationships S/W ENGG CONCEPTS System Engineering Testing Software Product Fundamentals Software development Life Cycle(SDLC) Software Project Management Methods for Software Engineering REFERENCES An introduction to database systems - C J Date

REFERENCES Software Engg - Ian Sommerville Software Engg - Agrawal KK & Yogesh Singh

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