How to Become a Microsoft Certified Professional
3.3. Practice Exams 101 – Part 1
By Val Bakh
In the first two blog posts of this series, we discussed Microsoft certifications and touched upon a couple of study options. It turned out that Microsoft’s online technical libraries and product documentation are no longer suitable as primary exam preparation tools. In this blog post, we’ll explore practice exam products: what they are and how to find the ones that are worth your money and effort.
3.3.1. The Ancient Adage
“Read the manual first!” is an ancient adage that has been haunting humankind since the days when we invented printing. Seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it? And still, often times, we buy some new high-tech gizmo, bring it home, unpack it, and then immediately start pushing its buttons and playing with whatever other controls it might have. But somehow it always seems to happen that we can’t make the thing do at least some of what we expect it to do. We scratch our heads, we push more buttons, and only after exhausting our creative zeal, we recall having seen a small brochure that came with the thing: the instruction manual. We dig it out from the depths of the packaging garbage and … slap our foreheads in exasperation. It turns out it was so easy and we were pushing all the wrong buttons. It’s all right here, in black and white: press Button A and then press Button B. Next time, we swear, we will read the instructions first. But by the time we buy another toy, the promise is long forgotten and the new buttons look a lot more appealing to our itchy fingers than an unobtrusive booklet, almost lost somewhere at the bottom of the box.
