6-30-06 I slayed the "Beast"

seuss_ssues

Well I finished my exam about 20 minutes ago and decided to give a quick writeup. It took me around 2 hours, contained 40 question, and 3 of those were sims.

I surprisingly finished with a very high score of 935 considering i was only 100% sure on around 20 questions. I do think that i got the luck of the draw and the majority of my questions were really short and rather easy to decipher. My 290 exam questions on average were probably twice as long in length.

As someone else had mentioned earlier be sure and know your security. I probably had 8 questions that dealt with security and lucky for me its something that I do have experience in.

Of course know your DNS and DHCP the bulk of the questions were based around those topics (dhcp relay agents, what type of DNS zone, etc)

The 3 sims I had were very nice and straight to the point. It was fairly easy to determine exactly what they wanted and get it done. I had sims which envolved editing a GPO for a SUS server and configuring the server. I had to create and edit some MX records. Lastly i had to create and configure some DNS zones.

Im rather low on funds at the momment (student loans are knocking) so i only purchased 1 book to prepare. It was the QUE book with ISBN: 0789729482;. I found it hard to just sit and read the book because of the number of screen shots and step by steps on how to do things, but it is a decent book if you can actually sit at a 2003 server and play around. Additionally I read alot from the built in windows help. I used the windows help to actually learn how to do most of the DNS that i know along with just learning some basic DNS theory.

Well my MCSA is over and i dont know where to go next, but i know im taking the next week off plus its July 4th next week.

seuss_ssues

On a side note for any MCSAs out there. Do i have to request my MCSA certification like I had to for my MCP or will they automatically mail it to me?