294: How did this happen!?
So I go to take my 294 test this morning. I have no sleep because I'm really worried about how prepared I am for this. I work full-time and am taking 3 college courses, and I basically forgot to reschedule this last week.
I leave an hour early since I can no longer test at the convenient Vue locations since Microsoft has partnered exclusively with Prometric. Anyway, so I get a nice long detour around the collapsed bridge during rush hour, and the directions to get to this place were insane. I'll sum it up by saying I was lost in a residential neighborhood at the time my test was supposed to start.
Anyway, I finally made it, and they let me start late. While my Prometric story isn't as bad as some, it was still frustrating. It took 30-60 seconds to process a question and move on. I was literally staring at a blank screen between every question. These are supposed to be Pentium 4 machines. Does it really take that long to process a single multiple choice question? My Pentium M notebook can do a complex sim in about 4 seconds and delivers results for 100+ questions in about 12. What's the deal?
I only took 90 minutes to complete the test (most spent at blank screens). It was 42 questions with 3 sims and around 8 drag-n-drops.
As far as the questions were concerned, there were a lot that were extremely obscure with a few no-brainers thrown in to boost self esteem or something. It's one thing to be frustrated because you can't remember an answer. It's a completely different story to look at a question and be like, "I don't even know what they're asking me." I swear, I encountered information that I had never come across. I honestly put my head down at question 30 and just wanted it to be over. The vast majority of the questions were software deployment and group policy with less of a focus on OUs. I didn't get any questions regarding filtering GPOs with security groups or replication (weird!) and probably less than 10 that focused on AD restore, sites, and operations master roles (combined). It was extremely lopsided (at least compared to other practice tests). It was like they found ways to force GPOs and software deployment into the other objectives.
I prepped with the MS Press book, Transcender, CBT Nuggets, and a few virtual machines in VMWare. This was the most difficult test for me thus far. A lot of people say it was the easiest. I only work with 25 employees in a single site, and my OUs are "desktops", "notebooks", and "employees". I really don't deal with a lot of the more complex GPO/software deployment tasks, so maybe that put me at a disadvantage.
Oh, my score? 810. Did you think I failed? Don't feel bad, I did too! I think the sims saved me. Transcender puts a ton of weight on the sims (like 1 point for each part, so they can be 8+ points), so maybe Microsoft does the same. There were fairly involved, and I nailed them. MS also includes "non-graded" questions, so maybe some of the more obscure ones were those as well. 291, here I come!
