70-643 looks like a trap.

jmritenour

I'm studying up for 70-643, planning to take it sometime in the next couple of months. I've heard people state this is either the hardest or second hardest in the EA track, but I'm not seeing it in any of the study material I've been over so far.

Most of the stuff in the objectives are things I feel like I know backwards and forwards - I do WDS, clustering, Hyper-V and work with storage arrays pretty much day in and day out, and I'm familiar enough with terminal services from past versions that it hasn't been that hard to grasp what's new and different in 2008 R2 and RD Gateway and Remote App. IIS my one weak area because I've hardly touched 7.0, but it's not seeming that hard.

Still, something about this exam feels like I'm walking into a trap. I'm using the MS book (best source so far, but it feels like some things are glazed over), Testout (not bad, but I'm leary of any material that refers to a "32 bit version" of 2008 R2), the MS It Academy manual & labs (sucks, it has not been updated for R2, and I feel there are a couple of objectives this material is totally worthless for as a result) and Server 2008 R2 Unleashed as a supplement.

Does anyone have any other sources to go over, or know of any other lab manuals for this that are geared more toward R2?

ptilsen

Don't let it fool you.. I work ~75% of the exam content every week in production, and another 15% sporadically. I've re-read the MS Press book cover-to-cover multiple times. I've failed three times now. I get 80-90% on Transcender practice exams, but scored high 500s and low 600s in my real attempts. Each attempt has yielded some very different types of questions.

The non-R2 material is not helpful. You shouldn't even look at it, IMO.

I haven't found any good materials other than labbing. Lots of labbing. There are some helpful technet virtual simulators. I've also gone through the pertinent chapters in R2 Unleashed, but I didn't feel particularly enlightened.

The possibly good news is that a big portion of the exam seems to be on remembering where to click and in what order. For the production work you do, that will help. I would recommend you try to get some real production experience dealing with IIS. You need to be to the point at which you know where to click to do virtually anything. That's tough because in the real-world you have an extremely intuitive interface and Google; you don't need to know. On the test, you need to know.

For some of the mundane fact recollection, I actually made my own flashcards. I focused specifically on SharePoint and WMS (my weakest areas), and it has helped a bit.

SharePoint is just like all the other topics in the sense that you have to remember exactly how to do things. It's unlike other areas in that the interface IMHO is not at all intuitive, so even teaching yourself to remember is difficult.

May the force be with you.

quinnyfly

Geez, after reading that, I may as well be like a poodle pooping razor blades. < What I just read gives me the shakes that is.....LoL> I thought AD and Net Insfrstructure looked tough enough! Reckon I'll be back to security certs after my next two MS certs. Thanks for the heads up guys, big help in determining future MS certs.

pumbaa_g

I have started to prepare for this exam. The way I am approaching this is
1. Start with CBT Nuggets (Topic by Topic)
2. After completing a topic on CBT Nugget go through the chapter in MCTS Study Guide
3. Reference Windows 2008 R2 Unleashed
4. Some labbing on VM's
After this Practice Tests from the Net and see my problem area and look them up on TechNet
Any suggestions/improvements?

jmritenour

All I know is that when the MS Press Book leads off nearly every chapter with someone along the lines of "This isn't how you would do it in the real world, but..." it's going to be a *****.

I think I'm going to go for it next Friday. I feel good enough about it, and have been labbing the hell out of IIS & WMS. I need to play with Sharepoint a bit more, but overall, I think this is do-able.

ptilsen

Let us know how it goes and any other details about your studying and experience after you've taken it. Good luck!

Slowhand

You could take a look at the 70-643 sticky thread in the Windows 2008 forums. Claymoore and earweed have put together some excellent resources for the exam, with Claymoore having done most of the up-front work back when the product was still in beta and earweed updating the list with the R2 content. In addition to your book, the TestOut material, and the labbing you're already doing, it's bound to help.

jmritenour

Trap confirmed. Failed yesterday with a 597, despite feeling better prepared for this than any other Microsoft exam I have ever taken. I was consistently crushing every practice test I was taking from 4 different sources, I've labbed the hell out of pretty much everything I could possibly lab - sorry, can't get too deep with the ASP.NET, and I'm not a web developer - and again, I use 75% of this stuff day to day. It just blows my mind. I never would've expected to fail by that kind of margin, or at all really.

What really bothers me, is that I didn't feel like I was on the verge of failing at all during the test. There were only a couple of questions I didn't feel good about. A few more that I had narrowed down to two choices, and felt like I chose the right answer between the two. The vast majority, I looked at the choices, and knew the right one without a second thought.

So, back to square one, I guess - this is frustrating, to feel so well prepared, but to come up so short. What's more, is I've exhausted nearly every resource I could find - there are not many good ones that cover the R2 content. And I read an assload of technet articles about IIS/ASP.NET to cover my gaps on that. I'm not even sure where to begin with preparation at this point, honestly.

MentholMoose

jmritenour wrote: »

What really bothers me, is that I didn't feel like I was on the verge of failing at all during the test. There were only a couple of questions I didn't feel good about. A few more that I had narrowed down to two choices, and felt like I chose the right answer between the two. The vast majority, I looked at the choices, and knew the right one without a second thought.

I think this happens because the questions are weighted. I've had exams where I was thinking that I must be close to 1000, only to score in the low 700s. It seems kind of unreasonable for 2-3 questions out of about 50 to make a huge difference, but based on my experience I think it's possible.

jmritenour

I believe you're probably right about that, Moose. I've heard/read that the IIS/Web applications questions are pretty heavily weighted, and that was where I was weakest in the score report.

pumbaa_g

I have admit, 70-643 is getting to me. I have completed the Nuggets by now but still feel woefully unprepared. Compared to 640/642 by this stage I was easily able to answer 60-70 percent of the sample questions. As of now I am nowhere near that score....
I think my previous post included a lot of bravado bought about by clearing 642 convincingly....aaaarrh

earweed

This test took me 4 tries to pass. I took it right when they had added R2 content to the test. All 4 tests were different as in different length tests and dufferent questioins and some different formatted questions. I found that labbing did some good but raeding different sources and seeing several practice test sources helped. The lengths were from 40 to 75 questions and the test I passed had 70 questions.

jmritenour

Took another stab today and came up a little short. I'm really frustrated with this one -the Sharepoint stuff feels like it should be a whole other exam. I have yet to encounter a single guide for this exam that covers Sharepoint in the depth that is covered on the exam itself. I encountered one question today that asked about configuring Outlook to integrate with Sharepoint, and I just groaned. That should be way out of the scope of this exam.

Back to the drawing board. I think I'm just going to have to suck it up and build a virtual lab dedicated to Sharepoint, with a functioning Exchange server.

ptilsen

I built a Sharepoint lab, not with Exchange, but with SMTP and directory integration and so on. Didn't help. I've bombed Sharepoint every time. Honestly, if it weren't such a small portion of the test, I'd consider reading through the MS Press book on the Sharepoint certification. However, given that I have absolutely no interest in ever professionally administering, configuring, or designing SharePoint, this seems like a waste of time.

The truth is, when you do the math, you could easily pass this exam while still bombing SharePoint. When I return to studying for it, I think I'm going to completely ignore SharePoint, and focus on getting near-perfect scores in the other areas. Network Application Services has always been my weakest section, but two of my threes attempts would have failed even if I'd perfected my "NAS" score. I would have passed every time if I'd done about 10% on each of the other sections.

So, don't make my mistake of getting too hung up on SharePoint. Unless you do want to be highly knowledgeable about SharePoint, focus on doing better on all the other topics.

jmritenour

I don't know about that - I aced deployment, was probably about 90% in IIS/Web applications (go figure), and 80-85% in RDP this time around. The network applications part was maybe 60% - still failed.

I know it's a small portion of the test, but once again, I'm at a loss here. I would've thought I was strong enough in all the other areas to carry me, but for network applications being only 20% of the test, there were a LOT of Sharepoint questions, and they got a lot deeper than any study material I've seen.

bdub

MentholMoose wrote: »

I think this happens because the questions are weighted. I've had exams where I was thinking that I must be close to 1000, only to score in the low 700s. It seems kind of unreasonable for 2-3 questions out of about 50 to make a huge difference, but based on my experience I think it's possible.

Yup, the problem is they will give you only 2-3 questions on a topic that is worth a huge % of the overall score. That was my experience with all of the MCITP exams. You get bombarded with a load of questions about one topic with a few others sprinkled in there and get even just 1 of those sprinkled in there ones wrong and you could fail the test.

I noticed this so my technique while taking the tests was to go through and answer every question I could answer right away, that I was sure of. I skipped the rest, and I would make a mental note of the topic and type of question. Then, when going back through I focused a lot more attention on those questions that covered topics I received few questions about, making damn sure to get those ones correct. It worked for quite well, I never failed any of the MCITP exams. After having struggled with 2003 exams, I learned some lessons.

Also, another trick I did was to intentionally answer some questions incorrectly but mark them for review. Supposedly from what I have heard these exams are adaptive, if you get too many hard questions correct, you will receive more of them. So the idea is to trick the exam into giving you the easier questions from the pool. When you go back through and review the ones marked then just change them to the correct answer. I have no idea if this has any impact on the difficulty of the questions, but its all about the placebo effect. I've always been that way, when I played sports as a kid I'm the type that had "lucky" underwear etc...

Really, these exams come down to test taking skills unfortunately.

pumbaa_g

Finished the MCTS Study Guide for 643, did the practice tests and got mixed results. Still weak in RDS/IIS and Window Media. Starting with RDS Resource Kit

kriscamaro68

Here is what I thought when I saw this thread:

tprice5

bdub wrote: »

Also, another trick I did was to intentionally answer some questions incorrectly but mark them for review. Supposedly from what I have heard these exams are adaptive, if you get too many hard questions correct, you will receive more of them. So the idea is to trick the exam into giving you the easier questions from the pool. When you go back through and review the ones marked then just change them to the correct answer.

I will be doing this from now on! ha

ptilsen

kriscamaro68 wrote: »

Here is what I thought when I saw this thread:

See my first response.

I don't think these are adaptive, but I might be wrong. Since you can review/change answers, it seems backwards to me that they would be adaptive, for exactly the reason described. They do however contain questions that don't count.

bdub

Yeah it seems silly to me that it would be possible to manipulate the exams in such a way but I've always been told they are adaptive. I know some people even believe the way you answer to the survey questions in the beginning have an impact on the difficulty of the questions, in fact even the course mentor at WGU states this.

pumbaa_g

hmmm...I always put in the time to study in the surveys as 6 months to 1 year. Should I start putting in one month to get easier questions?

tprice5

I always put myself with little experience, regardless of the topic, just in case.

Timski

Long time lurker but thought I would chime in, I did this monster the other day and passed - It was BRUTAL! Although I had been warned a few times to be careful with the RDP and Sharepoint stuff, (I use IIS all the time) I just did heaps of labs and used the Sybex book along with a heap of technet articles. All the best with it if you're going to tackle this one, I've found it seems to be the universally agreed hardest one on the EA track.

Essendon

@ Timski, wait till you face the 647. Grand-daddy of them all.

pumbaa_g

Agree with Essendon, 643 is convincingly No 2 amongst all I have spoken to regarding on the EA path. The undisputed Numero Uno remains 647
Sometimes I wonder why I am still on the EA Route when the easy way out will be the SA. I guess I like the punishment everyone seems to be going for SA nowdays for the easier step up to 2012.

Krunchi

You guys are killing me with this thread so much that I pushed my test date back to late next month back to the practice test for me.

pumbaa_g

Sorry about this mate, even I have had to postpone for a month or so as I have not been able to concentrate due to work and secondly I felt unprepared. Currently going through Remote Desktop/Hyper-V & IIS Resource Kit that I got at my library. Its really slow and tedious reading but lots of info to assimilate.
I want to ensure that I am at par on this as
1. Want to go into Virtualization & Hyper-V will be required.
2. Want a sound understanding of RDP as I want to try out Citrix later this year.

Timski

Essendon wrote: »

@ Timski, wait till you face the 647. Grand-daddy of them all.

As much as I do love receiving prior warning... You've gone and scared the pants off me now. Glad I haven't booked it in yet.

Oh yeah that was the other thing I forgot to mention when I did my 643, when I ended the exam I got my result then the computer locked up and wouldn't load the final survey, basically sat there for 10mins waiting for it before I decided I would leave, turns out they couldn't print my result until after I had finished it - Was a nervous few days after that waiting for prometric to email me saying that they had the result and I did indeed pass.

jmritenour

3rd time was the charm for me. I knocked this one out with a 740. Not a great score, but after the frustration with this one, I'm just glad it's over.

pumbaa_g

Congrats mate!