I am considering going through this. I have no idea if it is a good idea or not.
I’m your basic computer nerd type guy. Been mucking around with systems my whole life. To get a job, I recently took my A+ certifications and passed it without studying. I realize this would not be the case for the MCSE, but if I devoted a few months to it, could I manage it?
Should I consider doing something else in the meantime? I just rented some materials from my school library about it, so maybe that will help. TestOut I think it is.
Just a couple of things. You need to pass seven exams to attain MCSE. I think that’s ambitious for just a few months work, never mind the level of your knowledge. Secondly, Microsoft are ditching MCSE certification in 2008.
You may know PCs. That’ll get you through the XP exam, maybe the MCDST exams. But do you know servers? Active Directory? LANs, WANs? SQL? Exchange? How to design networks? There’s a lot there.
The volume of information is significant. Part of your trouble will be that your experience will tell you that your line of attack on the problem in the exam may well be all of the options displayed, but you’ve got to pick exactly the right one. And you’ve got to give the Microsoft ® answer, not the real-world answer. And many of the questions are not trivial: I’m not allowed to give chapter and verse, but in my XP exam there were two lengthy questions which differred by only one or two words. I remember taking my MCP in Windows NT4 and being done in 15 minutes; the exams are rather more difficult these days.
When I took it (in 1998), the Microsoft specific exams were really nitpicky and difficult if you didn’t study beforehand out of prep-specific material. Especially because MS does things in a really nonintuitive way (PC for bass ackwards.)
The generic computer-competency tests (which they may have phased out for all I know,) were easy but you needed to be prepared for the material. The TCP/IP exam was a piece of cake because compared to the rest of the material it is the height of rationality and you can absorb the material by just being exposed to sane Internet computing concpets in general.
Just buy the books, and seek out as many example tests//study guides/brain dumps/commentaries that you can find on line. They are a lot harder than the A+ in that they are looking for one specific answer. But I’ve never seen the need to take classes.
They are sematically tough. Microsoft has made them very difficult to test blast through by making the language very convoluted.
If A is transitive to B and C is subjective to D and you have a gizmo on D that puts the A in C but restricts putting the D on the B…and on and on and on and on…will C be able to put B into D?