Review of the new Microsoft exams

If you haven’t had an opportunity to take any of the new Microsoft exams (this would include the Server 2008 exams and the Vista exams), you are in for a couple of surprises; some good and some a little scary depending on the way that you have prepared for the exam.

The first thing that you are going notice is that the questions are a lot shorter. In the past most of the exam questions started with, “You are the systems administrator for some huge company, you have 5 kajillion Windows ME computers blah, blah, blah” and after reading through 5 paragraphs of information, they would want to know what the color of the sky is. On the new exams you are simply asked the question. No reading through War and Peace, just the question…what a relief. Now as the saying goes, “every silver lining has a dark cloud around it”, there is a minor problem with the shorter question format. With the older questions, I have always told students to not assume anything, if Microsoft wanted you to know something; they will tell you in the question text. Now you do have to make assumptions from time to time especially if the scenario that is being painted is based on a multistep process and they are asking about the last few steps, then you are going to have to assume that the previous steps were done and that they were done correctly.

Another new item that could be a little unnerving for some, but should be a piece of cake for the rest of you, is that there are simulators built into the exams and the questions associated to the simulators ask you to go out and actually DO the steps required to configure the computer in some specific fashion. If you have read some of my earlier exam prep blogs then you know I am a big proponent of my students knowing HOW something works in a Microsoft network. So these simulators should be easy to complete if you either have experience using the product, or have taken a class where you get to have hands on practice with the product. If your sole method of studying for the exam consists of buying a braindump and memorizing the answers, then the simulators are probably going to give you fits (as they are supposed to do).

The final item that Microsoft has implemented with their exams is a series of Heuristics that help them determine if someone is cheating on the exam. They take into account how fast you answer the questions, what questions you missed (to see if they match the questions on the braindumps that have wrong answers) and other criteria that may indicate that the person taking the test may be relying on memorization, instead of knowing the product. Cisco implemented this a few months ago and I am happy to see that Microsoft is following suit.

So all in all the tests are a better than they used to be; you don’t have to read a bunch of junk to get to the question; there are simulations so that you can show that you know how to use the product without having to wade through a bunch of terminology.