Microsoft makes some certification exams open book Microsoft has made some of its certification exams open book affairs, allowing access to its learning portal while candidates sit tests. "On August 22, we will begin updating our exams so that you will be able to access Microsoft Learn as you complete your exam," wrote Liberty Munson, director of psychometrics at Microsoft's …
Yes, all the people who did it by cramming all that stuff (and forgetting 95% of it after the test) are going to be annoyed. 'Back in MY day, son...'
But having full access to the internet is how most people do their jobs. When I need to know what's new in Python 3.9 I just search for that. Locking it down to only Microsoft Learn is still clutching your pearls, but I guess it's a start.
When I did my MCP (Windows 2000), it was a really useful being a foundation course in Windows and more general technology (DHCP, DNS, RAID and more).
I looked to upgrade my knowledge to a more recent version of Windows. Now it's little more than bulk learning PowerShell commands. Of no interest to me and something you can look up more easily.
This old fogey won't be annoyed - I always found "open book" exams harder than traditional cramming. Partly because of the need to find, read and understand while under time pressure, but I think examiners set much harder questions too. I also found it much easier to focus without the distraction of searching for material.
In the real world, though, knowing where to look things up is much better than having a certificate and not knowing (or having forgotten) everything.
"the need to find, read and understand while under time pressure"
Just like on the job really then? I work in infosec, and possibly half the job is, under time pressure, working out what's going on so you can fix it. So testing the ability to find, read and understand while under time pressure is probably a good thing.
Were there _ever_ any of interest to you?
We don't link to Dilbert any more, so I'll paraphrase:
PHB: Meet Bob, he is our latest Microsoft Certified Engineer and MVP; he'll fix your Azure problems.
Bob, swirls cape: I call upon the power of CERTIFICATION!
Dilbert: And?
Bob: Nothing, that is all I know how to do.
Got my MCSE 2000 back in the day and it cost me a packet. Six weeks later, I get a lovely letter from MS saying 'congrats on getting the qual, as you know MSCE 2003 is coming out so if you want to keep that qualification, you now have to pay us $$$$$ in test fees to keep it.'
Gave the letter the middle finger and never got any qual through them since. I take the odd course, but they are vendor neutral.
Vendor qualifications lock you into their ecosystem. Screw em. The only skill qualification needed on my team today is making a decent cuppa.
I've been certified (all the way to Professional Architect) on all three of the major cloud providers, and of the three, MS's exams have been the heaviest on the sorts of questions that could be looked up easily in the documentation. (e.g. 'Which Azure SKU do you need for feature X' or 'What's the correct CLI parameter for option Y') In the short term, pass rates will go up as the percentage of people that answer those particular questions correctly, goes up.
In the long term? Those sorts of questions will either be asked less during Item Development, or their contribution to the overall score will go down as more people get them right during the Pilot Testing phase of exam writing. (There will be fewer of the questions and/or they'll simply be worth fewer points.)
While "Ability to find things that are covered in the documentation" isn't a skill without value, it makes the test better if it's not a major part of the test score.
This. So many certification exams test how good you are at remembering arbritary numbers or command line options, rather than understanding and being able to apply the concepts you've been taught.
I've been on teams writing cert exams and you always get people who come up with "how many X do you need for y?" type questions. Why do you need to know that? You would just look it up if you couldn't remember. Luckily in my case those questions got binned but I see a lot of exams with them in, including the Azure stuff.
Talking of Azure (or azier as they seem to want to pronounce it) their prep tests are nothing like the final exam. They could do with fixing that.
The VMware certs used to be terrible for this. You could answer at least 5 questions on an exam by memorising the vSphere maximums, like maximum vCPUs per cluster or other equally pointless knowledge that would take you 10 seconds to look up. I still remember the maximum VMDK size before ESXi v5.5 - it was 2TB - 512 bytes - and I can't remember ever having to use that knowledge professionally. A total waste of my time and effort! Unfortunately for me, when I took the ESXi 6.0 exam, I followed all the old revision tricks I'd used in the past, I memorised all the maximums and not one of them came up! Instead, they changed to a more 'experience/job based' approach and asked even dafter questions like 'What is the first button on the left after clicking on the network tab blah blah... '. As someone who nearly always used the CLI tools, I was thinking: "How the fuck would I know? And why would I even care?" There are no perfect ways to test an engineer's knowledge, but that was fucking ridiculous. I failed it on the first attempt, but memorised some screen views and passed it 2nd time around. Sheesh!
I had an MCSE back in the day when it taught and then tested you in detail on TCP/IP, DNS, DHCP and other widely used and important protocol-level, vendor-neutral knowledge. I studied hard and learned shit loads from them, and those exams are one of the best investments I ever made in my career. Although looking back to Windows NT 4, the most precious thing I ever learned was to reapply Service Pack 6a after doing literally anything, and no certification is more useful than that!
Subsequently, I did all sorts of certs - more MCSEs, MCSD, VCP, VCAP-DCA, VCAP-DCD, MCITP, CCNA, and CCNP. I gained a truly tremendous amount of knowledge from them, and I would advise any young whipper snapper to do the same as I did. However, that is no longer possible as cert exams are now little more than an extension of a vendor's technical marketing program. You'll gain so little real knowledge from doing them, but you will get an excellent grounding in the various product and support SKUs, software licenses and lifecycles, privacy policies and not much more. The whole concept of tech certs has been destroyed by this nonsense and reading any cert guide now just makes me want to scream 'JUST FUCK OFF, FUCK OFF, NOT BLOODY INTERESTED, I DON'T FUCKING CARE. ARGH! FUCK. OFF. PLEASE. FUCK. OFF!"
I work primarily in public clouds these days, and the certs in those are even fucking worse. It's like they've devised a way to inject L. Brad Chessington Jnr - Senior VP from Corporate Marketing and Sales - and his corporate sales manual into your brain by convincing you that memorising it is necessary for your technical education and professional development. Fuck that! I therefore stopped doing any certs a few years ago. Now I do all my learning myself, based on what I enjoy and what I can use to conjure up a fun mini-project or whatever. I wouldn't advise anyone to do certs these days if they wish to actually learn something. If you have to do them for work or job hunting, that's different and you have my unwavering sympathy. But if you want to learn, do something else, it will benefit your sanity and your knowledge.
Strangely, I managed for 30 years without any cert, only now I need certs.
It used to be easy to prove my skills, the interviewer used to be a technical person but not anymore, now from recruiter and agent to project manager, tech lead and architect, nobody can evaluate my skills.
A colleague of mine swears that when he sat a Citrix Metaframe exam many years ago, one of the questions that came up was "In what year was Citrix founded?".
While not getting anything as insane as that in a real exam, in a practice Citrix exam I got a question that basically asked "How many times do you click next in the product installer".
Recent certifications on Azure do just seem to be either pointless exercises in PowerShell syntax that you would look up or worse, questions where the answers could be different depending on when the exam was written, since it is a constantly moving target.
The only reason I have ever bothered with certs is when my employer needs them to keep a partner level.
I took - and was the first person outside of Citrix to pass, apparently* - the Metaframe XP exam whilst it was in beta. It's been a while, and I assume it's still the same, but back then you got the whole pool of questions and they were marked by a human.
One of the questions was "What?"
Worse, it was multiple choice with four check boxes. Each one had no text with it.
I have mentioned it here before but vendor certifications are there for companies to get their Gold or Platinum or <insert precious metal> partner level. You see it every year "Oh we need x number of people qualified to y certification for z vendor" at which point they cast around for some poor soul who they think can make up the numbers and shove them on a course (if they're "lucky"), or give them some study time and expect them to pass the exam(s) in question.
At any other time of the year? Training budget? What's that?
*I got a phone call from Citrix. They were very congratulatory. Other than that I got...nothing special. No gold card (lol MS), no t-shirt. Not even a mug. The company I worked for though, got a US$50 voucher towards sending someone on a course...
I strongly agree with this, for one simple reason: "How do you do X?" questions, unless they are trivia, should really be answered "I google to find the correct process in the official docs, and follow them"
A poster child for this I have been asked in an interview was "How do you restore an Active Directory backup with the entire computer network offline?" As an interviewer, I would be seriously worried by any candidate who could answer that correctly and accurately in detail without prompts!
Which is why your first answer, is the statement, "describe your backup for me". I've always found the best way to answer an interview question, is to throw it back to the interviewer. I'll never forget the day I was asked "Would you ever lie to a customer?". I responded "Would you ever instruct me to?". He was lost for words, he clearly had the correct answer in his head, and the reasoning for it on which he based his hiring and firing, but wasn't expecting me to throw the same question back to him.
It makes sense, unless you use them every single day most people don't remember PowerShell command syntax or things like that.
I did a Symantec Technical Specialist course on Enterprise Vault years ago, and most of the questions were pre-sales type stuff and not technical at all.
MS are also giving away vouchers left right and centre for the Fundamentals level courses in Azure and Microsoft 365, IME a lot of non-techies now have these quals because of that.
The Azure Fundamentals course is the worst exam I have ever taken. It was a free voucher and I was asked to take it by my employer as they wanted all techies to be certified in AZ-900. I bailed after maybe 10 questions as it had bugger-all to do with anything technical and all to do with marketing, licensing, and support contracts. As an experienced techie, I found it just insulting. No, thank you, not for me.
Yes I tried to take that and had been developing using Azure for years and thought this will be easy.
I was expecting questions about Subscriptions, Resource Groups, Storage accounts, how to deploy things etc.
But no it was all sort of weird questions about what support contract you opt for in different situations and that sort of thing.
Stuff that 1% of the organisation probably needs to know and would probably negotiate with a MS sales rep anyway.
And the older documentation, typically corrected or annotated by comments in the forums, gets removed within days of a product going end-of-life, because it seems no one at MS can be bothered to read through it and update the applicable version number from say Windows 7 to 10 and so stop the auto cull.
Is “ MS Learn” the new name for Technet, KB and Support community/forums?
Just asking as I would want candidates to learn how to navigate the resources they will be accessing on-the-job and not (just) some specially crafted and maintained “learning resource”.
Also, this might encourage better curation and maintenance of the resources.
[Aside: been on other learning sites who only give access to the learning reference materials for the duration of your studies and 6~12 months after completion. ]
If Microsoft would end the word and mind games in their test questions and simply test you on the knowledge of the subjects, would make for more straight forward testing. Much like their treatment of customers, Microsoft loves ambiguity and confusion in their testing. Learn documentation is inaccurate, since Microsoft can't stop fiddling and changing Windows.
The fundamental problem is that for several decades now convenience in marking has taken precedence over actually verifying candidate capacities. Once pretty much everyone went over to multiple choice (simply because it's easy for computers to mark and therefore cheap to conduct) that set the nature of exam questions, as they had to have simple finite answers rather than allowing descriptive expositions (essay and short answer) which would need expert evaluation at marking time. This, coupled with the commercial characteristics of a certification market which has to maintain high pass rates to stay in business, there is a need to not make it too hard to pass on the basis of actual knowledge and understanding. So we've finished up for the most part with parrot memory tests, which should (and apparently do) make LLMs the perfect candidates for many certifications, despite their being incapable for the most part of doing the job the certification notionally equips the candidate for (but, for the above reasons, actually hardly ever does).
You have expressed my thoughts exactly, far better than I can manage. The only problem is that I can't see an immediate way out of this, because to remain viable certs must be cheap and attractive to exam takers.
For this, they have to be:
1) made up of multiple choice questions, so they remain markable by computers, and therefore cheap
2) easy enough to pass in order to ensure keep people taking them
The only thing that I can envision changing in the near future is that AI will become able to accurately mark written, longer-form answers.
At a previous job, people thought I was some kind of SAP god. They would ask me, "Is there a way to do X" and then I'd type something into google along the lines of "SAP <whatever they wanted to do> tcode" and then try a couple of the ones that came up. The amount of time it took them to send me an email or IM was probably about what it would have taken to just do what I did in "let me google that for you!"
When you get down to it, just making something open book doesn't guarantee that the person will be able to find the correct answer. It's not like you can just show up for a test the day of and expect to pass because it's open book. You still need to know the material generally to even know where to look in the book.
"Microsoft is committed to improving the overall exam experience to ensure that everyone who wants to take a Microsoft Certification exam can do it without any barriers or hurdles and showcase your expertise for in demand job roles,"
Reading the above would pretty much convince me to keep flipping burgers. :)
Unix/Linux/Network administration verges on insanity at times but anything MS always seems like a scam and completely retarded.
The weakness in most of this "modern" approach is that you will only learn as much as is required to solve the immediate problem and hoping one day the gaps will be filled in. The idea of sitting down and reading (say) the O'Reilly "DNS and Bind" (Liu and Albitz) text for someone who is likely to need to manage some part of their DNS infrastructure, is completely foreign. By way of an example the W.Richard Steven's books for me have for decades been a gift that just keeps giving (and the poor sod died 24 years ago.)
But the idea behind Microsoft Azure exams isn't to teach people anything useful, to verify real skills, but only to create more Azure evangelists, to sell more Azure, for these wannabe developers to know how to achieve something only by using Azure resources, to be useless for anything else.
Most of new, young IT people aren't tech-minded guys, they do that or the other because they've learnt that particular thing they're doing, their skills aren't transferable. With these courses and certs, Microsoft taps into this new world of people who will only do how they've been told to do it, they "learn" Azure so Azure is the only thing they know, nothing else.
Like Windows was back then: a person learnt how to use Windows, they ended up using Windows all their life.
When I started as a programmer 30 years ago, I remember the piles of (sometimes expensive) books we had. 11 ring bound manuals for the database, A shelf of Cobol Manuals, reference guides, Java API guides, Windows API, books full of algorithms etc.
Then you'd go on a training course and come back with a binder or two.
You couldn't just google it and if the vendor did have a website it was just for sales and maybe you could email them.
Still using one of my Java books as a monitor stand!
Must admit times are better now.
Exams, in general, test the ability to pass exams above an understanding of the subject in question.
In my academic career, up to first degree, in the 60's and early 70's, I sat one open-book exam - one of my final year modules, Electronic Circuit Design.
It was the one and only exam I ever sat that I felt tested my understanding of the subject over my ability to regurgitate facts. I've been boring on about this for the subsequent 50 years, predating the Internet by a little bit.
Of course, to set an exam that does this, the exam setter needs to be highly skilled, but you'd hope that was the case. OK, in this case, it was (then) Dr. (now Prof) Bob Spence, so that definitely applies.
As for vendor quals, don't get me started on them......
Oh, and multiple choice questions. You can game multi-choice far too easily with just a little knowledge - again, unless they're set with a high degree of skill.
I've passed a number of Azure certs last year and they were all fucking dreadful ! You really needed to learn use cases by heart, some of them, there was no way in hell you could do half of the trap questions at more than 50 % without cheating.
Maybe now, they're back into softening up a bit ? Indeed, many questions were about some strange details you could get online easily, aka, which permissions of Key Vault are RBAC based, which are policy based ? Now, today, everything is RBAC, but back then ...
When I did my Certifications the exams where timed, so to get a high pass mark you needed to complete x amount of questions in a given time. you either knew the answers or didn't. and most wasn't even in the books/course material you learnt it from doing the job.
So making it open book are we to assume the time limits have gone or has the pass mark been lowered.
I know I've forgotten more than most newbies will even know as everything now is SW only nothing about software and hardware interactions and trouble shooting techniques. thats few and far between nowadays. still time marches on and retirement is getting closer thankfully!!!!!!!!
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