I have always struggled with the decision. I guess I still have a bad taste in my mouth from when an MSCE was way too easy to obtain and I worked with "experts" who knew diddly-squat. It doesn't help that I'm a terrible test taker and always have been. I'm more of a hands-on kind of guy.

I did have to take a certification for, of all things, MS Access 2007 just so I could teach a class. I figured that it would be a no-brainer, but it took me three attempts to pass (and not with a great score)! Though it was a simulated exam where you actually had to perform the operations, it didn't take me long to realize that for every question posed, there were actually a number of different methods that could be used to obtain the desired results but the exam was looking for only one of those methods. Apparently, I had to solve the problem exactly in the manner that the exam was expecting. I passed the third time because I used the simplest (GUI-based), though not the best or most efficient, methods.

I know that I have the skills to pass the SQL Server exams, but if the testing method is anything like the one for Access, then I'm not sure that I'd be able to pass the first time. At the price of testing, I can't keep taking them to fail repeatedly just because I use a different method that the one the test is expecting.