Yessiree folks, from this day forward, you can address me as Subway Prophet, MCP. (Microsoft Certified Professional, meaning I’ve passed at least one exam towards the Microsoft Certified System Engineer.)
I’ve always kind of turned my nose up at these technical certifications. Back in the dot-com days, it seemed like everyone had one, and their value was only slightly better than toilet paper. Fast-forward to today, I only have an Associate’s degree under my belt, and every job I’ve applied for in the past two years required certification of some kind. I finally took the hint and took Microsoft exam 070-290 (“Mananaging and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Environment”).
It handed me my butt on a platter, but somehow I won! (I believe the term I’m searching for is “W00T!”)
The questions were harder than I expected, but they must grant partial credit on at least some of them, because I’m sure I answered more than 20% incorrectly. (The test center says the minimum passing score was 700 points, and I scored 785. The website says the minimum passing score is 80%, and 700 is 80% of 875, which seems like a weird maximum score, so I’m not sure what percent I actually got right, but it appears to be about 89.7%. Oops, my inner math geek is showing. Sorry!)
I didn’t study as well as I could have. I just kind of assumed that my ~20 years of computer network experience would pull me through. This assumption is wildly incorrect - most of the questions were specific to Microsoft’s latest and greatest server software, and some questions focused on the differences between Windows Server 2000 and Windows Server 2003. Looking at the materials for the next exam, I’m not sure I could pass without some serious review. Test 4 will definitely make me cry like a little girl.
So that’s what it means. I always thought it stood for “Must Consult Professional.”
Kidding aside, congrats. Certification exams I’ve noticed have a nasty habit of trowing curveballs you simply have no way of anticipating. I recall the CompTIA A+ exam was … interesting. There were scads of questions that were phrased rather ambiguously such that there could be two correct answers depending on how you understood the question. It was frustrating, but I still passed, even if I didn’t ace it.
I took two exams long ago, and passed both first time out, but they were freakin’ backbreaking. Definitely not easy. A lot of questions were about specific syntax, and I always wanted to answer E) Press F1 for help.
I know what you mean about poorly-phrased questions, Mindfield. I counted at least 3 questions with typos, out of 45. Which can be a little distressing given that I had at least one question that, if the comma were in a different spot, would’ve completely changed the answer.
And yes, tdn, given that pay raises are coming down the pike if I pass these exams, it feels really good.
Oh, Og. I hated the syntax questions. I knew the answers and could do them by rote, but when it came time to actually reconstruct it based on a worded description of the scenario, it was like I couldn’t remember specifics. I just did it; I’d forgotten to pay attention to it enough to be able to write it down at a later date based on a scenario that’s different than any I’ve actually come across in practical application.
Speaking of which, why is it that so many of the scenarios they paint in these exams are exactly the sort of things you never actually come across in real life? Where are the real questions? You know, like “Joe’s system has slowed to a crawl and his resources are being eaten up. Upon examining his system configuration, you notice that he has three trojans, several dozen viruses and a porn dialer installed, and at least one of the viruses has corrupted numerous files in the Windows root and SYSTEM32 folders. What do you do? List in order of operation.”
Well, I didn’t notice any significant typos, but the punctuation is absolutely one of the things I encountered – twice, that I recall.
Hey, congrats. I’ve had my MCSE for almost ten years now, and while it’s not the be-all end-all cert, it did help open a few doors for me that wouldn’t have been there.
And if you love the syntax and phrasing on the Microsoft tests, just wait until you take a Cisco test. Ugh. 4 multiple choice answers, and you gotta pick which one of the four is more right. One will be wrong, the other three will all work. But which one works the best?
I gave the SAP QM certification a try last Christmas.
There is a particular detail that’s written a particular way in the all SAP documents; it’s how the books have it; it’s how the courses teach it.
It’s business-critical and it’s wrong, wrong, wrong in all those documents. So of course it was one of the questions; the right answer wasn’t even one of the options. Sadly, the guy proctoring the exam wasn’t amenable to “I found several errors;” one of my coworkers just got his certificate (he’s the first QM-Cert I know!) and his proctor did ask people to holler softly for him if they found mistakes.
The part of the test on which I got a 100% was the only part I’d never used
And of course, like Mindfield says, they don’t ask the real questions like “half the warehouse managers in the company are up in arms, threatening with going on strike, because a movement which they do daily and which had never blocked material is now blocking it. The other half of the warehouse managers are now off-duty but will start yelling as soon as they get to work if this isn’t fixed. What do you do?” (answer: find out the name of the new-hire who changed config on that movement to ‘send to quality’ and get his ass fired, then politely yell again at that idiot who still refuses to understand that if he wants to send something to quality he has to use a different movement than to just move it from a corner of the warehouse to another). No, no. It was “which field has to be set in order to establish a coeficient of qualitatification for the ultramadufication of in-transit materials, during go-live periods?” Possible answers: MARC-MYDADDY, MARA-YOMOMMA, SXAZ-SUCKSAMILE. I don’t care about the freaking technical names, I just click on the square beside “establish coeficient of qualitatification”
I’ve a good friend who graduated with me in 2004. She got her degree in Computer Science. Would you recommend she also attempt those certification exams?
In high school, I knew this guy who was some freakishly talented computer wizard type. He took one of the Microsoft courses our freshman year in high school and passed the exam on the first try. Apparently his mother, in a burst of motherly pride, notified the school. Sometimes when students accomplished notable things, they’d announce it during the morning announcements.
But something to lost in the details, and one of the secretaries proudly announced to the entire school to congratulate John Doe on having earned his Microwave Certification.
It depends on the job market, really. The certifications are just a means to get a job, and if she can do fine with just her degree, then that’s really all she needs.
If hers is a bachelor’s degree, then her odds are much better than mine. I’ve spent the last 4 or 5 years scraping by with an Associate’s of Applied Science (from a tech school, looks fabulous on a resume :rolleyes: ), and decided that I had to either go to school full time right now (not likely with the current income) or get these certificates to give myself better footing in order to go back to school full time later.
However, with absurd job descriptions that ask for 8 years management experience with Windows Server 2003 (count the years) and three trainer-level certificates in addition to a master’s degree, just to get a job interview, it couldn’t hurt to get extra certs under her belt. Without knowing any specifics about her situation, I’d recommend she get what employment she can now, and persuade the employer to reimburse her for certification while on the job (assuming her employer would in fact pay for the certification.)
Again, without knowing any specifics, I’d recommend self-study over classes, simply because the books are significantly more affordable. (No recommendation yet on which books are better, though in my experience the Microsoft Press ones exhibit unbounded suckage.)
