I just passed Microsoft's 70-210 test for "Installing and adminstering Windows 2000". This was to renew my "Microsoft Certified Professional" status, which, combined with another programmer here who also has that cert, allows our company to have some sort of status with Microsoft I forget (something like Certified Partner or something).

Anyway, I haven't had to take one of these tests for a couple of years, and I had forgotten how awful they were. Who else has had to take these damn things?

Okay, for starters, they make you memorize crap that no real human being in his right mind would memorize. For example, the command-line parameters to obscure utilities which you would use perhaps once every ten years. Jeez, don't these people know about the "/?" parameter?

Then there are the questions which basically state "Our operating system has an egregious bug which is completely inexcusable. What is our lame work-around for our bug?" They even have questions on the test about "This third-party manufacturer's specific device has crappy drivers, producing the following specific error message on win2k. What is the lame work-around for this specific problem?"

And then there's the accessibility options questions. They have four nearly-identically-named features (filterkeys, stickykeys, serialkeys, togglekeys), and expect us to memorize exactly what each one does without looking at the online help. What's worse is that there's no way to tell from each name what the function does. If you use the root word of the feature name as a guide, you'll get it wrong because they don't do what their name suggests. For instance, the purpose of one of them is to beep when capslock is pressed but it is not named beepkeys.

And don't get me started on the poor wording of the questions. Some questions didn't give you enough information to answer the question correctly, even when you knew the feature inside and out. It was as if they wanted to make certain that everyone got at least some questions wrong.

Worst of all, I prepped for this test by going through a 250-question practice test several times. There were at least two questions on the practice test that were verbatim-identical to the ones on the real test, but the answers (all four possible ones) were completely different. The correct answer on the practice test wasn't even available on the real test.

I'm amazed I passed it at all. While taking the test, I had doubts I would pass it.

Anyone else share my frustration? God, I hope I never have to get an MCSE.

Whoa Tony's name went from green to red... Getting festive for the holidays, are we?

More on-topic to your post in the off-topic forum, I have never taken any MS cert tests and I don't think I'll ever have to because I do all my development in on the Solaris platform. Of course I use PC's from day to day and we integrate with Win2K's crappy bastardized version of kerberos, but I'm primarily a UNIX guy, and thank $DEITY for that.

Yeah, red means administrator. Paul upped my status today so that I could lock and delete threads on all boards as necessary. There was one thread I thought should be locked because it was cross-posted to multiple forums.

Holy cow is that the first locked thread in the history of the Empeg BBS? If so that tells you something about the quality of the discussion around here.

Yeah, and it was only because of a simple cross-posting, nothing serious.

Yeah... I remember this much ado about nothing thread which could have used some locking back in the day. Otherwise people are generally well-behaved around here, for reasons that have already been mentioned.

Maybe the high prices we paid for our Empegs are buying us a better forum. If 14 year old AOLers could go plop down $199 for an Empeg, we might be as overrun with trolls as, say, Slashdot, Anandtech, or any of the myriad console forums.

If 14 year old AOLers could go plop down $199 for an Empeg, we might be as overrun with trolls as, say, Slashdot, Anandtech, or any of the myriad console forums.

I agree 100%.

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.

Well put.

Yeah, we need to have two MCP's in our company to maintain our status, and the other guy didn't have to renew his stuff this year because his cert was in VB six years ago. (!)

One thing that surprised me, though: There were a few questions on the test I just took where the answer really was "buy a third party tool, Microsoft's product doesn't have this feature". Unexpected.