Yesterday morning, I took Microsoft 70-298, which was way harder than I had anticipated.
But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that I phoned in most of my study time, and it doesn’t matter that I barely passed.
Because it was my last fucking exam.
I am now an MCSE (Server 2003.) I could be an MCSE: Security if I took one more exam, but I just can’t be arsed to give a shit. I spent something around nine months of my life devoted to this shit, and from my chair, it’s all done now. I don’t have to think about Microsoft bullshit exams for a while.
I would like no more than to dive into specifics about what I did and how I did it, but considering Microsoft makes you sign an NDA before you take any exam, and this is a public forum, I will avoid that. However, accurate general information is still pretty hard to come by, so here goes.
Assuming you’re a reasonably intelligent person, you have put in a little bit (not a lot, just a little bit) of time & effort administrating Windows systems before and you don’t have to be told what a domain is or what DNS does (not necessarily how it works) you could easily do this in the same amount of time I spent. You could do it in less, in fact, because I spent a lot of the time I spent fighting the usual doldrums.
The exam questions seem to run the gamut from the “so obvious they might as well just have asked me what one plus one is” to the “What third-rate hack horror writer cooked this scenario up anyway, and why doesn’t it involve psychics or vampires?” The sims – or at least the ones I got, anyway – are absolutely dead simple, and as they are a huge part of the score on most exams it doesn’t take a lot of effort to smoke ‘em.
It’s hard to say which exam is the hardest. Some are hard because they have huge, vast topic pools to choose from and thus you have to study the material A LOT (70-270, 70-290.) Some are hard because they ask very specific questions about a limited number of topics (70-293, 70-294.) I found this approach made the earlier exams “harder,” but it would really be a matter of opinion for each student. In general, if I had one piece of insight to give about the MCSE, it is this: Take the exams in this sequence: 270, 290, 291, 293, 294, 298, elective. Microsoft does not strictly require you take them in any sort of progression, but had I done this, I think things would have been at least a little simpler for me, and if you were starting from nothing and working up this would be a far simpler approach than mixing them up. It also places the “hard because of a vast variety of material” questions in the beginning, which I found personally tougher than the others, so it’s simpler to get them out of the way first. Personally, I’d like to see Microsoft require you to take them in that order, if only so all the 3rd party training materials for the later exams would avoid the “This is a domain” and “This is DNS” speeches that seem to occur at the beginning of every video and book because there is no strict enforced order and no prereqs for any exam. Seriously, you have no business taking 70-294 until you have a firm grip on what a domain is, how users and groups work, how DNS works in AD, blah, blah, blah, blah…
Overall, I’d say that I did actually learn quite a lot from the MCSE 2003, but a lot of it was subsidiary knowledge I picked up along the way. Since, in my opinion, about half the questions I was asked didn’t have a really firm grip on reality, I’d say that knowledge was only marginally useful in actually completing the exams. That was kinda sad, but it has proven very useful IRL, so it’s hard to complain. Plus I might get a raise out of this. I’m still hopeful.
Coming up next: Mav takes a good three-month break, and after Defcon starts working on RHCE shit. I still want to go that route, but since it is highly unlikely my employer will pay for it (which is pathetic for a few specific reasons I won’t get into here,) I’m going to have to burn up a G-and-a-half of my own money to get it. Not really looking forward to that part so much.
So, if anybody out there cares enough to pay attention to my life, I officially completed it on June 1, less than 30 days from deadline. Hopefully I beat the spread, you made some cassssssh, and you can then take me out to dinner.