2nd of June this year I’ve passed MS70-515 exam. I’ve reached 910/1000. I want to share few thoughts about exam and preparations.
Preparations
I’ve started by reading Self-Paced training kit. Book itself is quite boring, got some hard time getting through it. Perhaps because I was reading about things that I knew from every-day work. But there also was some new stuff, for example web-parts. After going through book I’ve done suggested practices and exercises and moved to questions contained on attached CD. Questions from book’s CD are quite hard and sneaky. After first test I’ve kind of freak-out. This made me to go through MSDN documentation, against list of objectives, that I strongly recommend: http://www.certsandprogs.com/search/label/70-515. Also you can easily find some free, downloadable samples of actual test questions. These samples can help you to get distinction between book’s CD questions and actual exam questions. Off course you can spend some $ and buy actual questions. I was not so eager to have them, since I believed that I was able to pass by myself.
Looking back I have to say I’ve wasted lots of time on reading and practicing various tools and subjects. I just hope that will use major part of this knowledge in future, so time wont be literally wasted.
Exam
Exam itself was not too hard. I think, that even without any preparations I could have pass it, since passing score is 70%. I’m basing this judgment on questions that i got on the exam, off course I might got lucky, and get easy(for me) questions. What were these questions about? Mostly about jQuery (witch I really like and know quite well) and very simple asp.net and MVC.net stuff (really simple). There were some harder ones as well, for example about dynamic data pages.
What really got me negatively astonished was exam software. It was like time-trip back to early 90’s. Overall experience is really poor, but thing that bothered me the most was user unfriendly scroll bar. To scroll down, to see all the answers I had to keep mouse pointer within scrollbars width. It may seem trivial and irrelevant when just reading about it, but when using not my own mouse and focusing on questions it’s easy to get pointer out of this couple pixels strap. In such case scroll returns to initial position, and I got side-tracked by “jumping” content.
Was it worth the effort? I believe it was, but let life judge it. I’m up to job-search, so it will judge it quite quickly.