On the morning of 31st December 2007 I decided to start the New Years resolutions early. So I booked in for the .Net Framework 2.0 exam (70-536). The main reasoning behind this was multi-fold. I wanted to gain some certifications for the work I had been doing for some time and thought this seemed like an appropriate way to go. I also very much wanted to prove to myself that I could still pass a Microsoft exam after a 7 year hiatus, and I wanted to see if the examining techniques had improved at all during the time of may last exam in September 2000!
The date I got was 8th February 2008 giving me approximately 5 weeks to prepare. Having done some C# and quite a bit of .Net I thought this wouldn’t be a problem. The following week I purchased a copy of the MCTS Self Paced Training kit (exam 70-536) from Amazon and set about following each of the objectives (7 in all) as well as the case studies, sample questions at the end of each chapter and practice tests provided on a separate CD sold with the book. This was progressing nicely, however as the test date loomed I began to skip some of the case studies and instead sought out practice questions found freely on the internet.
Exam day duly arrived and I found myself in the test centre all too quickly. I was told by the receptionist that there were several formats to the exam and so I was not suprised to be sitting in front of an exam format with 40 questions and a 700 pass mark (out of 1000) only a few minutes later. For me, this was not a big problem in that I am a believer of knowing the material and you will pass, however having skated through the first 10 questions I soon realised that I positively new the answer to 2 of the first 10 questions. GULP!
The next 30 questions were similar so I answered the ones I could quickly and ear-marked quite a number for further review. Damn, wished I’d have done a few more of those case studies!
After 2 hours I could bear the strain no longer and pushed the “end exam” button whereupon the score of “PASS” popped up offering a detailed breakdown of the 7 objectives that are tested. PHEW!
Alot harder in reality than I thought. I will be following the web track (70-528 next!) and will be putting in more preparation work and allowing longer for this work to be done next time. I still think it is a relatively poor way to assess whether you are a good .Net developer but it is hard to imagine how the practicalities of ”live” debugging and “write me some code to do this…” would work out in reality.
The exam also does not simulate the realities of life since most programmers will want to have a good working knowledge of what a technology can be made to do without necessarily knowing exactly how it is done and will want to know how specific patterns apply to their work, none of which is tested. The exam is all about syntax, detail and semantics when in reality on-line help and google do much to resolve the syntax and semantic related issues. My motto is this, know what you do each day in your job, appreciate what technologies can do and for everything else there is a reference, be it google, on-line help or good old fashioned books!
Nice one mate, well done on the pass. I’m sitting mine on Wednesday. I’ve never done any .net development before studying for this exam, but have done lots of Java. I’m fairly confident, but the wording of the questions sometimes throw me off, so fingers crossed!
Thanks Beakster and good luck for Wednesday! If you have done plenty of reading around .Net framework 2.0 and read plenty of MSDN aricles you should be fine. I found there was plenty of time in the exam to blow off for a while and then come back down to Earth to work out the answers. Just read and re-read the questions I’m sure you’ll do fine.
Perhaps you can let me know how you found it?
Hmm… I took 70-536 last week (Tuesday), I got 1000 / 1000 and I only skimmed through the topics the previous 3 days.
Maybe the difference is that I’ve been working with .NET for a long time now, but I found it very very easy.
Tomorrow I’m taking 70-528
Well done Juan. Good luck with 70-528!