Microsoft exams are a funny beast. I’ve worked in the hosting business for the last 3 years. The only reason that hosting companies even bother with the MS partnership program is because it is a requirement to be at least a registered partner to get SPLA. After that, it’s pretty pointless because MS is a competitor (Azure, etc) rather than being a partner to hosting companies. So I didn’t really do anything to maintain my certification status other than complete my 2000-to-2003 MCSE upgrade a few years ago.
Now I’m working for a consulting company that is a partner and where the partnership is very important (naturally enough). I’ve got to get certain exams and I’ve got to upgrade from 2003 MCSE. I’ve also got to replace my dust-collecting elective exams from the 2000 generation. I was looking through syllabus material yesterday and decided I’d sit the OpsMgr 2007 exam this morning.
I found the exam to be pretty easy 2.5 years of using OpsMgr every day including design, deployment, and troubleshooting prepared me perfectly. Most of the exam was based on management pack management and customization, notifications, and a little backup/recovery. Oddly enough, there was more material in the exam on certificate enabled agents than you’ll find in any whitepaper or technet page! I’ve previously blogged about this subject (around 2 years ago).
Now, most of us know what MS exam questions are like. Don’t answer with real world solutions; instead you should answer with the marketing solutions. And sometimes, there is a question that makes absolutely no sense at all.
For example, I had one question that gave me a scenario where an agent did not appear in a view. How would I troubleshoot it. The answer was … to review the agent in the view where it wasn’t appearing in the first place!!!! I know I got the right answer because my exam score was 1000/1000. I left a comment on the question to explain the silliness of the scenario. I knew the answer was not really a real world answer. I was only sure of the “answer” for this question because the other 3 options made no sense or weren’t options. A struggling person familiar with agent deployment would have assumed that one of the other was was the answer because the real “answer” made no sense. That’s quite unfair.
I struggled with this stuff when I originally started doing MS certification. I’ve no problem admitting that I miserably failed my first ever exam: Windows NT 4.0 Workstation. I answered questions based on what I knew, what I learned, and what was documented in the real world. That experience drove me away from exams for quite a while. After one or two 2000 exams, I learned what to look for. There’s usually a key word or phrase in a question. My problem is that I get wound up in an exam and speed read, missing that key word or phrase. I learned to control this, catch the phrase and that would guide you to the answer. But then there is the marketing question/answer. Those are a struggle because sometimes one of the alternative and wrong answers is a stepping stone to a real solution. But you have to ignore that. Those are the questions I tick for review before ending the exam. I’ve had times when I’ve gone over those 4 or 5 times, changing my mind over and over.
Anway, I’m considering ConfigMgr for my next exam as an elective replacement. I also have to do the R2 virtualisation exam. I haven’t really looked at VDI – can anyone explain to me why there is a full module on VDI in the R2 virtualisation exam when there is a dedicated VDI exam? And I’ll have to find time to replace my AD design elective and do the 2 MCSE 2003 -> 2008 upgrade exams. Ugh!