Thank you for all your great suggestions about how you prepare to take an exam!
The ACE Chronicles Super Heroes, Psychomagician and Super Sigma, are on another case and need your help! Let's talk about the countdown to test day!
We are curious about how you psych yourself up to take the exam. Do you get nervous before exams? What do you do to minimize your anxiety? What strategies do you have to keep your cool? If someone was about to take their first Microsoft certification exam, what advice would you give them to prepare mentally for the exam beyond all those “practice, practice, practice” prep tips?
Do you wear the same shirt or shoes every time you study and on test day? Maybe, you like to jog your short term memory by eating some chocolate before taking the exam or run through the objective domain the night before the exam so your dreams are filled with sugar plums and configurations? By the way, Psychomagician has looked into the research around exam preparation and stuff like this really works! You’ll have to watch the next episode of The ACE Chronicles to learn more about that nugget!
Do you have any horror stories that are good lessons learned for people who are new to Microsoft certification? For example, have you ever gone to the wrong test center? Have you ever arrived at the test center and found it closed? Or worse yet, have you ever taken the wrong exam?! If you'd only known then what you know now...
This makes me think of Scrooge, and being visited by the Ghosts of Christmases Past! Here's your chance to help someone escape from being haunted by their soon-to-be-first exam experience!
In my last few blog posts, I have been hinting that something big was coming, something awesome, something that would entertain and educate, something amazing really. Well, the time is now! I am very excited to introduce you to Psychomagician and Super Sigma, superheroes tasked with investigating cases based on your questions about Microsoft certifications and exams. Not only will they answer your questions, they will also provide information on emerging issues. In other words, they will make sure you have the most up to date information about all things certification and exam, and they might even share some insights into life at Microsoft.
YOUR MISSION…if you choose to accept it:
Now, go watch that video…we’d love to hear what you think about ACE Chronicles!
In my last post, where I introduced The ACE Chronicles, I promised to provide you with the most up to date and in-depth information about our certification process.
Recently, I have been hearing some chatter about how to prepare for an exam. People are curious about best practices and tips to get the most out of study time, and specifically how to prepare for a Beta exam.
Now, The ACE Chronicles Heroes are on the job, investigating how you prepare for exams!
Think about the materials you review, skills you practice, sites you reference, and so on. What resources do you use? How do you get experience and gain knowledge about each of the skills listed in the "Skills Measured" section of the Exam Details page?
And, what if anything, do you do differently when preparing to take a Beta exam? Since courseware isn't available, how do you get up to speed on the technology for Beta exams? What references do you seek out?
What would you tell a first time test taker? What are your tried and true exam prep tips? The ACE Chronicles Heroes can only solve this mystery with your help! Let us know how you prepare for exams and give us something awesome that we can use to kick off The ACE Chronicles! (You want to know what this is, right?!)
Microsoft Learning’s Certification team is pleased to announce that exam candidates will be seeing several new question types in the coming months.
Want to see how we’ll be testing the ability to analyze code?… Check out the new Code Analysis question type.
Or testing the ability to diagnose complex troubleshooting scenarios?… Check out the Multi-Source Reasoning question type.
You can preview all of the new question types in the First Look Forum, here.
And if you’re wondering which exams the new item types will be on, or how many of these new types you can expect to see on your exams, here are some FAQs.
We’ll add to the FAQs as we go!
Hello Born to Learn world, thanks for tuning into my first blog post! My name is Briana Roberts and I am a Content Project Manager on the Assessments and Certifications team – ACE for short - in Microsoft Learning. As a Content Project Manager, or PjM for short, I oversee the development of Microsoft Certification exams, their localization and compliance with industry certification standards, and finally their release for Microsoft consumers – you!
I am also the evangelist for the ACE team, working to drive deeper awareness of our products. I am sure some of you may feel that the Microsoft world, and certainly the world of certifications, seem practically as familiar as the Land of Oz.
Before I was a Project Manager at Microsoft I never used typical Project Management expressions. “Who do we have on the line?” and “We seem to have a bit of scope creep” and “Are these change requests mandatory or nice to have?” These now seem to be standards in my vocabulary.
I bet that sounds like corporate jargon to you. On that note, I am hoping to demystify Microsoft and our certifications by sharing with you an inside look into the certification process. I am going to be teaming up with our resident psychometrician, Liberty Munson, whom many of you may be familiar with already, to blog as much as I can about what we do on the ACE team and about how the exam development process works.
I'll let you know about upcoming changes to our certification process, new innovations and developments, and insights overall about how exams come into being. Some of my posts will answer questions many of you are asking, like: “How do you prepare for exams?", "What are some of your tried and true exam prep tips?”, “How do you psych yourself up to take an exam?", "How do you minimize anxiety?" and "What are your strategies to keep your cool?” I am also going to be pairing my posts with the continuation of the Ask a Certification Expert (ACE) Video Series, but with a little bit of a twist – the ACE Chronicles - more to come on that in a future post!
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to ask me questions! What do you want to know about how Microsoft Certification exams are created? What are you most curious about? My hope, through this blog series, is to educate you on some of the best practices the community uses, answer the most important questions that are top of mind to you, and give you a peek into how we maintain the value of our certification brand. If there are questions you have about any of our efforts, policies and practices, please let me know!
I will take your questions on a trip down the yellow brick road in my ruby red slippers, with the all-knowledgeable Liberty as my partner in crime, in search of an answer!