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In my 11 year career as an IT instructor, I’ve had to pass a lot of certification exams. In many cases not on the first try. Sometimes for fair reasons, and sometimes, it feels, for unfair reasons. Recently I had to take the venerable Cisco CCNA R&S exam again. For various reasons I’d allowed it to expire, and hadn’t taken many exams for a while. But recently I needed to re-certify with it which reminded me of the whole process.
Having taken so many exams (50+ in the past 11 years) I’ve developed some opinions on the style and content of exams.

In particular, I’ve identified some types of questions I utterly loath for their lack of aptitude measurement, uselessness, and overall jackassery. Plus, a couple of styles that I like.
This criticisms is for all certification exams, from various vendors, and not limited to even IT.
To Certify, Or Not To Certify
The question of the usefulness of certification is not new.
One one hand, you have a need to weed out the know-its from the know-it-nots, a way to effectively measure a person’s aptitude in a given subject. A certification exam, in its purest form, is meant to Continue reading