Yes Tony,
I agree with you 100%.
I sat and passed my seond MS exam [a Visual Basic 6.0 desktop development exam] about 18 months ago as I needed to for my new job and I had a free test voucher, courtesy of TechEd the year before.
[My first was Networking essentials v2 some time ago when I was comtemplating doing a MCSE].
I can tell you that despite using all the practise tests we could find, that the real questions were not even close to the practise exams.
They ask you lots of stupid questions about various 'new' features of the product you are taking the test on and of course by the time you're taking the test these features are now so out of date and/or have been replaced by newer and even better features that [or more likely, MS have realised what a dumbf**k idea these features were and have silently canned them from future releases, but not the exam questions].
As Someone who has used lots of MS products and Visual Basic in particular for 9 years from V1.0 to 6.0 I found the tests a waste of time for anything but allowing my company the rights to call itself a Solution Provider.
Most of the exam was about features no-one in their right mind ever uses [and if they do and admit to it, I wouldn't hire them as programmers or anything else].
I dislike the vague questions they ask like presenting some scenairios and asking for the 'best' solution, without indicating what the criteria being used to judge 'best' by.
In some cases the best answer according to theory would result in either a performance or mantainance nightmare for the next poor guy drafted in to look after the now legacy system.
I also found a lot of the networking/deployment/remote support questions assumed that T1 lines were cheap and could [and in fact ARE] run from anywhereTM to anywhereTM in the planet without problems or extensive costs.
While that may be the case in the US, most of the rest of the world doesn't [yet] have the luxury of T1lines or any reasonable fraction of one for a reasonable monthly rental figure not close to a kings ransom.
As an employer I look at MS [paper] qualified people as if they were a necessary evil, and who generally spout the MS line they learnt during the exams on the problems they are involved with solving.
As a employee I look at MS exams as mostly a convenient way for people to pigeon hole/downgrade my skills. I have skills far beyond what MS says I have but employers look for the pieces of paper as thats what MS has told them to have.
Many times in my career I have found that the MS qualified peoples input to a problem is too theoretical, generally without consideration of all the issues that real world problems have and they seldom have the ability to work outside the MS square.
Not all the world wants to run the latest MS everything even if they could afford it all.
Give me 1 person with real world experience over 12 MS qualified people with paper skills and no non-MS experience.
P.S. The biggest single gripe I have about MS, their people and their products is that will not admit there is anything wrong with any of their *current* products UNTIL the next release of a product is out, then they roundly proceed to kick the crap of the product(s) that they were defending to the death 2 weeks before.
If a product has shortcomings then they should admit that yes there is a problem, heres a work around and the next release will fix it.
The other gripe I have that they have a real not-invented-here syndrome. If a solution to a problem can be done using non-MS products, MS won't admit to it, they will instead show you how a entire raft of MS products can be kludged together to approximate the solution required when the non-MS solution is the neatest fit costwise and everything else wise.