MS Certification Exams

Scott Hanselman ranted yesterday about the people putting all their MS certification initials after their names. A comment from Mike Gunderloy threw me into the "way-back" machine...back to perhaps 5 years ago when Chris Kinsman and I were hired to do the technical review of the Windows Architecture exams that Mike and Ken Getz wrote the questions for. Boy, we sure fought a lot over those questions. Not sure why exactly: Those exams were pretty pointless anyway.

Jonathan Goodyear (who also started blogging this week) has ranted regularly about MS Certification exams on AngryCoder. In fact, there's even a piece on there by Nathian Smith - written almost exactly two years ago - entitled Microsoft Certified Illusion that defines Certifications as "the annoying two-mile string everyone feels they must have on their email signature." Plus ca change, plus ca mem chose.

2 Comments

  • Just in the interest of historical accuracy - Ken and I contributed to that those exams, but there were lots of other authors. And of course all of the design decisions of what should be on them was made before we got involved.





    Unfortunately, most of what I'd like to say about the exam-writing process is constrained by NDAs. The bottom line is that I view certification exams as indicating something -- or rather, not being able to pass them indicates something. Not a lot, I grant you, but something.

  • I want a copy of the exam.

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