One of the more common complaints about
Microsoft exams is that they do not map well to course
materials. That is, Microsoft exams often contain questions that test on
material not found in courses. To some extent this assertion is true. But, the situation with regard to course-to-exam mapping is more
complex than it might first appear. In many instances, exam items might
initially appear to test on content not found in the courses, but closer
scrutiny reveals that in fact the exam item could be answered with knowledge of
the content found in the course and in the pre-requisite courses. The problem
here is that in order to answer the question, the test candidate has to make
connections among material found throughout the course or found in the course's
pre-requisite courses- in other words, you would not be able to find the answer
to the question in one, single location in the course. And, once you take these
kinds of questions into account, the exam-to-course mapping for Microsoft exams
is actually better than a lot of people suppose.
To gain a better insight into this issue and Microsoft
exams in general, you need to have an understanding of the goals of Microsoft
exams. The primary goal of a Microsoft exam is to measure your "real-world"
skills. And, because in the real world, you do not solve problems or implement
solutions by being able to recite facts from a book, Microsoft exams likewise do
not test you on your ability to simply recall facts. That is why you will
rarely, if ever, see a question that asks you to recall some factoid you read in
a course, such as "What are the minimum system requirements for installing
Windows 2000 Professional?" or "What is the name of the kernel-level driver for
the Workstation service?"
To test your "real-world" skills, Microsoft designs exam
questions that test your ability to analyze situations, solve problems,
synthesize and integrate information from different sources, and make decisions
based on the best available information. Asking you to recall some factoid only
tests your memory and not these other cognitive skills. That is why so many of
the questions you see on a Microsoft exam are based on scenarios. Some of these
scenarios can be limited to a single question, but often you will see scenarios
that extend over multiple questions. The most extreme example of scenarios that
extend over multiple questions is the new type of Case- Study based questions
that first appeared in exam 70-100, Analyzing Requirements and Defining Solution
Architectures, and which may appear on some of the Windows 2000 exams.
Scenario-based questions often pose a problem and then
offer solutions. In some cases, you will be asked to identify the proper
solution as the answer to the question. In other cases, you will be asked
evaluate the effectiveness of solutions proposed in the question itself. In
either case, the scenario will describe a particular situation that has a number
of different elements. Some of these elements will be relevant to the problem
you are trying to resolve; others may not be relevant at all. In order to answer
the question, you will first have to eliminate elements from the scenario that
have little or no effect on the problem.
Let's take the example of a question that asks you to
solve some problem related to slow server or disk response. The question might
include some statistics from Performance Monitor relating to the disk, memory,
processor, and network. Now, while the disk subsystem might be the source of the
bottleneck, often the problem is related to insufficient RAM or some other
resource scarcity. In reading the scenario, you will need to determine whether
the information on the disk subsystem should be given more weight than
information related to the memory subsystem. If you are given a list of
statistics from Performance Monitor counters as part of the scenario, you will
have to know how to read, interpret and evaluate those counters. There is just
no way that you can answer a question like this from memory alone. Sure, you
might remember that the particular course talks about the relationship between
RAM, paging, and disk response; however, this knowledge alone isn't enough to
answer the question, although you would have to know this in order to begin to
evaluate the scenario and correctly answer the question.
In a case like this, you might think that the question
tested you on information found outside the course. But, in reality, this is not
the case. The course did provide you with fundamental information--the
relationship between the amount of RAM, paging, and disk response. But, the
question asks you to apply that knowledge and other knowledge, such as your
familiarity with Performance Monitor and Performance Monitor counters that you
gained through the labs, not simply regurgitate information found in the course.
In order to answer the question, you had to take information found in a variety
of places within the course (both lecture and lab), synthesize and integrate
that information, and finally make a decision based on an analysis of the data
presented to you.
To say (or complain) that the question went outside the
course is to miss the central point of Microsoft exams: they strive to test you
on your ability to use higher-level cognitive skills to correctly solve problems
and provide solutions. You have to think in order to answer these questions. It
is unfortunate, then, that many people use brain dumps to pass exams--studying
brain dumps only helps to improve your short-term memory; studying brain dumps
does not help you improve the skills you truly need to be an effective IT
professional.
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