Passed and throughts...

Daniel333

Hey everyone,

Second shot inspired me to take another exam and looks like I won't need it. Passed with a 781. But this is another exam that left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Computer crashed twice. Took me 2 1/2 hours to complete.

Been in IT for about 4 years, maybe 2 of them taking care of Windows 2k3 server directly.
Watched the video at vtc.com, twice
Went through the testout set, twice
Read the Sybex book, twice
Read the Microsoft press book once and ran it's labs several times.
Logged myself at 45hours in labs
Transcender tests
Microsoft.com/webcast has a 13 hour webcast on group policy I found helpful (at least 2 questions were answered on this webcast!)

Trying to avoid NDA here, but here are some thoughts

I would say that there was at least a quarter of what I was tested on was not in the materials I used and I had to best guess it. I would say anyone coming into this should do what I did but also need to spend some more time working with ISA Server 2000/VPNs. There were questions directly related to the use and application of ISA server. Quite frustrating as I sorta skipped through that in my studies.

I was also shocked to find the level of complexity with RRAS. I felt it was only lightly touched in the training but it was quite heavy on the exam. Moreso than then 70-291.

I also found the trivial nature of some of the questions to be frustrating. Some of the questions on clustering were the worst. I can't because of NDA, tell you what it was, but I can say you need to memorize the screen. Not just concept/how to. Make sure you a can draw each screen from memory and list each step one by one to do everything down to the smallest detail.

Certificates questions and such were actually well written and the questions very straight forward. Gotta give a thumbs up to Microsoft for this. Covered the concepts well in the training material and the questions reflected what I had learned well.

dynamik

About time you took an exam; it's been forever

I agree with you on all of that. I've yet to take an MS exam and feel like it adequately covered the objectives. You'll get a handful of well-written questions, then you'll get a lot that are just stupid gimmes, and then a lot of others that are beyond obscure. Unfortunately for you, 294 might be the worst as far as all that goes

Anyway, congrats on the pass. Even though all that effort didn't earn you a perfect score, you probably have an outstanding handle on the material, and that's all that matters.