Yesterday I posted a quick blurb about my certification plans this year.  Well, ok not full blown plans , but you get the gist.  I announced that I would be taking an exam this morning.  Well, this is to report on that experience.

I scheduled the exam for near first thing in the morning.  I didn’t do first thing but what’s 15 minutes?  I got there 20 minutes early (Prometric recommends arriving up to 30 minutes early).  The location was not difficult to find but it was more than an hour drive (not too enamored by that, but hey it is what it is ).  At test start time, I was already signed in at the center and ready to go.  They started prepping the computer and everything looked good to go.  I clicked on “start exam” and that is when things turned south.

Needless to say, thirty minutes later and I had yet to proceed past the first question.  Was I in over my head?  Had I studied enough at this point?  I was ready to just ask the administrator to forget it and reschedule me.  I might have done so as well, but she was far too busy with other exam takers and on the phone with this person and that.  She really needed a few more bodies in the testing center today.  SO, I waited patiently until she could breath.

She was about to start helping another candidate get into his computer, when he politely suggested she help me first.  She came back to me to assist.  One more time we were going to try to get this exam working on the computer after prior failures.  You see, the exam just blew up on the computer and it took 30+ minutes to get it running properly.  This time, after clicking “start exam” we thought it was going to fail again.  Then five minutes later it finally popped up.  We had already given up hope on this computer.

As for the actual exam and material, I didn’t like the 5 second delay between clicking next and finally getting to see that question.  But there was more than adequate time to complete the exam and then to review the questions.  There was also plenty of time to take both surveys.  I am pleased to announce that I scored somewhere between 700 and 1000.  Most of the questions that I missed came in the security topic, so I will be working on that topic a bit more.

Last quip for this exam, I thought it was too basic.  Take that how you will with my prior comments.  It really seemed more entry level and that is probably an accurate level for this particular exam.  If you have been working with SQL Server 2008 for a couple of years, you should be able to pass this exam – my opinion.  Some of my sentiments on this match what Jack Corbett said when he passed the same exam.  You can read his comments here.

Now on to 70-433 and then the MCITP equivalents (pre-reqs first then the MCITP stuff).