I’ve decided to go for the second (and final) exam of the MCDST certification and purchased the online training and exam voucher from Measureup. Unfortunately their stupid system did not include the voucher code with the receipt for the exam so I can’t actually register for the exam. Naturally their support lines are now closed and I’m *really* hoping that there will still be exam vacancies at the testing centre for Wednesday when I ring MeasureUp to complain as I will not be a happy bunny if I can’t take the exam in August (not that I’m expecting to fail of course).
As an aside on the quality of MeasureUp’s practise exams – they are pretty good but way out of date. Most of the questions that I had today were on service pack2 and it’s new features including Remote Desktop Support, Popup blocking and ICS. None of this was covered in their online support material (which did cover service pack1).
I’ve also had a couple of problems using the exams – the problem I had with only 106 questions appearing instead of 150 was unexplicably caused by either Firefox or an invalid cookie – using IE which I hadn’t used on the site gave me the full 150 question set.
Although the exam was fairly taxing in the usual Microsoft way where you think “What on earth are they on about” and “How many do I pick when it says select all that may apply”, I passed the exam with flying colours. The password was 700 (70% I guess) with 61 questions to be answered in 155 minutes. I got 899 – which works out at about 6 questions wrong – more than I would have liked but I’m sure that at least one of the questions was missing a ‘t when the question was “What must you do so that Andrew can do …..” and yet all the answers were talking about what he can‘t do.
Now I have to work out if I can afford to do the second exam to get the MCDST qualification……
I’ve signed up to take the first of the MCDST exams (70-271) on Monday. It would have been nice to have taken them whilst employed (to get the often practised employers rebate of a successful test) but as that does not seem to be happening I’ve decided to fork out to get some more certifications on the resume as after all my most recent ones are some time ago. I took advantage of the Measureup tests where you get the practise tests for free if you sign up for the voucher for the exam. I’ve taken the practise tests and have clarified some of the points that I needed to learn. The hardest bit is remembering which options are on the xp dialog boxes as that is what the test seems to be about – how well can you memorise the menus, screens and dialogs. If you had an xp box in front of you it would be very easy to work out which option in which order you need to use to satisfy the exam question. This is not my favourite kind of test as I’m more of a visual, hands on person as opposed to a remember for the sake of it person.
One of the bad things about the measureup tests is that their sales pitch says it has 150 questions, but there are actually only 106 – seems like false advertising to me – if I had purchased it I would have pursued a 30% rebate (based on the number of questions) but as it comes free, its more difficult to argue. I certainly think that you’d have some case for a rebate if you had paid the (overpriced) $60.
Depending on how this exam goes, I will sit the next exam by Wednesday to get the safety net of the second chance which will then get me the MCDST certification – which is a starter to proving my skill set which is an expensive thing to do when unemployed.