During the course of the Microsoft exam development and release cycle, there is a point in time where it becomes necessary to examine the product and float the exam content in front of actual professionals who are experienced in the IT industry. While the opportunity has the net effect to these professionals of a free attempt at a new exam, the real target of the program is to provide Microsoft with a critical opportunity to find out both how professionals approach exam items as well as procuring specific comments on how various items treat the material related to the subject being tested. As a test taker, preparing for these opportunities is far more challenging than getting ready for a production exam for several reasons.
- A beta exam is longer than a production exam.
- Often the competency list for the exam is often very general or not yet fully developed when the beta exam is offered.
- Beta exams often focus on new products for which training may not be available yet.
- If training materials ARE available, they are often in a beta state themselves.
- Practice tests are almost never available for beta exams.
- It is difficult to patiently wait for the beta results.
Having taken a myriad of Microsoft beta exams myself, hopefully we can step through some of these common challenges and identify some strategies to be able to effectively target sitting new beta certification exams.
Obtaining the Opportunity
The first step in maximizing your Microsoft beta exam opportunities is ensuring that you have the opportunity in the first place. Microsoft has identified a hierarchy by which they release beta test announcements. By making sure that you have taken advantage of each step of the beta community stack that you have available, you can put yourself in a position to learn about betas early and ensure a seat in many beta exams.
- Internal
- Most Valuable Professionals (MVP)
- Microsoft Certified Trainers (MCT)
- Selected candidates and companies
- Microsoft Certified Professionals (MCP)
- Public
The first place that Microsoft looks for beta candidates is internally and in the MVP community. These are high influence, limited audiences which are highly engaged directly with Microsoft and that Microsoft knows has a certain level of connection with the company and its products. This is one of the few categories where an individual will not have an opportunity to "apply" into it from the outside.
The next step is the Microsoft Certified Trainer community. If you have an existing "premium" credential from Microsoft (MCSD, MCSE, MCPD, MCITP) and you can provide proof of your presentation skills either through proof of having completed a course on the subject or through providing proof of a certification in the subject, you are eligible to become a Microsoft Certified Trainer. A warning, however. Becoming a Microsoft Certified Trainer simply to gain access to beta exams is probably not the right way to get in on beta exams if you are not actually doing something related to the training of folks working on Microsoft technologies. The price of admission into the program is high ($400 a year in the US, per annum) and is due every year that you continue to be a trainer. The benefits of the program obviously extend well beyond simply beta exam access but are focused on the function of the group which is preparing trainers in the industry to bring accurate official training on Microsoft technology to the public or to private organizations.
In some cases the program manager of a given exam track may have a pool of individuals who they are familiar with related to the product or particular organizations which have been of assistance in the past in taking part in a beta exam and these folks will be invited to take an exam. The key here is to make sure that your feedback on exams is useful and that you are making use of every opportunity to provide good feedback on exam questions, including feedback on the ones that aren't necessarily "wrong" or "broken". More on this later.
The next step is to provide access to the beta exam to the MCP community. In some cases, the exam team may use the profile of folks in the certified professional community to determine if there are candidates which are particularly strong in a past product of the same line. If the individual has marked that they may receive the MCP flash newsletter from the MCP program, they are then in a position where they can be contacted about possible beta opportunities. Most of the folks interested in beta certification are themselves already certified. If you are not, you will need to complete a single MCP or MCTS exam to join the community and complete an MCP profile. If you are already an MCP from past certification efforts, you will need to make sure that you have configured your personal profile to subscribe to the MCP flash.
The final opportunity for beta certifications is being a member of the public. Congratulations, you may pat yourself on the back, you are already a member of this highly esteemed community! More seriously, the key is really just knowing where to look for beta opportunities that make it to the public. The best place to find out about these kinds of opportunities are the blogs of key Microsoft Learning certification team members.
- Trika Harms zum Spreckel
http://blogs.msdn.com/trika/default.aspx
Trika is an MCP communications marketer from Microsoft Learning and while you will encounter a certain amount of ..... shall we say "waffle"? ..... in every post, a certain amount of the content will also be specifically certification related. Many of the beta opportunities that go public will do so here. - Gerry O'brien
http://blogs.msdn.com/gerryo/default.aspx
Gerry is a key certification program manager. His is a very important blog particularly for development and SQL exams however sometimes beta opportunities will first pop up here as well.
Also of interest are the newsgroups for the various Microsoft technologies, which we will cover in a moment when we start looking at preparation material.
Preparing for a Beta Exam
For those who are familiar with production editions of the Microsoft certification exams, there are often a comprehensive set of resources that Microsoft has compiled around working with the product in question. Often these resources include Microsoft Press titles, E-Learning courses, as well as the numbers of the Microsoft courses which address this particular area of product technology being certified.
The largest challenge in getting ready for a Microsoft beta exam is getting ready for the exam in an environment where there are little to no available resources prepared for the exam. So the trick here is to try and find resources that offer a learning experience roughly equivalent to the more comprehensive "official" production resources that will accompany the exam when they release later. The silver lining in this particular cloud is that if you dont mind studying from written self study materials, you stand a good chance of finding useful information in a myriad of Microsoft-sanctioned technical sites. Unfortunately, because much of the material is so new, those who find audio or visual learning materials the most suitable for learning new technologies will have to focus more on spending time with the product as opposed to looking for dedicated learning materials in preferred formats.
Microsoft TechNet
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx
Availability: Public
Microsoft TechNet, primarily for the engineering side of information technology, is one of the primary sources for hard information on a new product before the product is even out. It used to be that in order to get information from TechNet, you could anticipate only being able to locate knowledge-base-like article compilations on the various technical features of a product. While the documentation during the period of time that most exam betas are being made available (usually RTM minus 30 or 60 days) is certainly not yet in a complete state, many of the key preparation guides for deployment and architecture are already available as downloadable documents. Further, in recent years, Microsoft has expanded the offering base of TechNet to include both webcasts and Virtual Labs. The webcasts are usually more along the lines of feature demonstrations where you can see someone describing the business model or reasoning behind a set of features integrated into the product and are usually of limited utility for exam preparation.
The Virtual Labs on the other hand provide an invaluable opportunity to really get your hands on the product. One of the general keys to certification that I emphasize with people is preparing with at least two different kinds of study material. While there may be other written resources available to get ready for a product release, even during the beta phase, there is simply no substitute for being able to put your mouse and keyboard on an actively running environment with the product installed. Virtual Labs offer you that opportunity to, for a limited time, launch an environment where the product is running with sample information and really get into it and do whatever you want with the product. Most labs are accompanied by guides which focus on specific aspects of the product and will show you how to do some very basic operations however the full version of the product is usually present and the virtual machine will not restrict your actions so if there are additional features you would like to practice with, Virtual Labs will allow you to do this without hosing your own custom environment.
MSDN (MicroSoft Developers Network)
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx
Availability: Public
As TechNet is for the IT professionals, so MSDN is for the developers. MSDN really provides a focused window on the technological underpinning of new development tools, languages, and technologies from Microsoft. These references range from troubleshooting common problems in a knowledge-base-like format to code snippets for particular classes and components of the various .NET frameworks. In recent years, much like TechNet, the MSDN toolset has been expanded from a compilation of technology focused mini-articles to really integrate additional information resources together around common themes. For those who are interested in more active methods of demonstrating development technology, most major languages and tools have video demonstrations of the tool or of building a basic proof of concept with a particular piece of development technology. These kind of interactive features are often rather slim during the beta period however they are still resources to be considered as often attempting the beta of a development test is far more challenging than IT Pro counterparts because of the type of focus and experience that an individual needs to have with the new features being described in the programming set.
At the time of this writing, Visual Studio 2008 is still pre-release yet there are an entire category of demonstration videos and tutorial videos available for the product on MSDN. I would strongly encourage a developer who is new to preparing for beta developer exams to seek the extended technical documentation on MSDN which can provide the bread and butter, so to speak, of your beta exam preparation, and to check and see if there may be video or other interactive resources available to provide that second mode of study.
Product Team Blogs
Various URLs (See Below)
Availability: Public
There are a number of product teams out there. Many folks are not aware that many of the major teams have team blogs, some of them better kept up-to-date than others. For some teams, updating the team blog is actually a task assigned to certain members of the team on a periodic basis to ensure that they are providing a quality resource which is often updated. Other teams may have a blog but it may not be updated on nearly the same level and as a result it may not be as strong a beta resource. Your mileage may vary but searching out to find out what the product team has said about a new product's features is a worthwhile pursuit as even if the blog is not there or is not useful for your beta, the pursuit of the blog will only take a few minutes anyway. Here are a few to get you started:
Microsoft-Hosted Discussion Forums and Newsgroups
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/default.aspx?siteid=1
http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/default.aspx?siteid=17
http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.aspx
Availability: Public
I am really not going to spend a lot of time here as folks who have spent much time on the internet (as most professionals would) should know how forums and newsgroups work. I have posted the primary portal link for the largest Microsoft entry points for these resources above. Your mileage may vary as these are community based support avenues.
Microsoft Partner Knowledge Base
Availability: MCPs, MCTs, Microsoft Partners
Microsoft's partner knowledge base includes updated information on upcoming products which has not yet been published to the public technical communities that are widely referenced. Because this information is often new and based on a beta state, there is an NDA for access to the information in the database. If you are an MCP or MCT, I would certainly encourage you to log on to the MCP and MCT member sites, look under program resources, and choose knowledge base.
Microsoft Partner Training
https://partner.microsoft.com/US/trainingevents
Availability: Microsoft Partners
For those folks out there who presently work for a Microsoft Partner organization, there are often a number of technical partner preparation courses which provide information on new products before the products release. These resources are protected and you will need to ensure that your passport is associated with the partner account for your company however once that happens, you can use the training search tools to find local training resources. The key thing to take away here is that partners are often offered advance in-person training opportunities at a discounted or free rate. These kinds of advanced opportunities are sometimes the best quick-preparation methods to ascertain specific information on the technical components of new products.
What to Expect on a Microsoft Beta Exam
For those familiar with the production exam structure for most MCP exams, there are going to be few surprises in the actual exam structure for a beta exam. To summarize everything, a beta exam is a production exam with a larger number of exam items as well as the expectation that a few of the items will be wanting for correction. Just like with a production exam, the exact number of items to expect on a beta exam will vary greatly between different exams. I have had experience with beta exams of more than 90 items in length as well as a few beta opportunities where the question pool has barely surpassed 50 items. On the beta exam, you will be presented with all of these items so the time that it will take to complete a beta exam will be longer than a regular exam.
The window of time that you are given to take the beta is roughly 4 hours in length. You will most likely not use all of it. Just like in a regular exam, the clock is there to ensure you finish the exam, not necessarily to put time pressure on you. I have never even been close to using all 4 hours, most of the time my experience has been between an hour and two hours. The amount of time that it takes you to finish the beta exam really depends on the length of the exam as well as your own familiarity with the subject matter being tested. A beta for Windows Vista, for example, which I use every day for months before the exam, I completed very quickly. A recent beta for System Center Operations Manager, which I did not have as much pre-release experience with, took considerably more time as there were more questions that I needed to reason out the answer based on my understanding of the SCOM architecture. Plan for the 4 hours but I will tell you now that you will very likely not use it all.
Also, many of the items that you will be presented have not yet been fully polished. It is a beta! I have seen instances where you are asked to choose two answers and there are in fact two that are correct but the exam will only let you select one. I have seen multiple choice questions with checkboxes that will not let you continue unless you select two. Badly worded questions. Unclear answers. These are PRECISELY the kinds of things that the beta is intended to catch or to refine. Don't worry about getting these "wrong" because they are broken. In beta scoring, these sorts of items are usually dropped from the scoring process.
Providing Feedback to Microsoft
On the exam itself, the marking an item for review function should be used liberally. Recall that this is a beta exam and while it would be nice to earn the credential without having paid for the exam, what Microsoft is looking for out of the whole experience is the feedback on the exam features as much as how various questions "score" with the professional audience. There are really two main ways to give feedback on the exam. The first way is to provide commenting on questions during the exam itself. The second way is to score well and participate in some of the post-beta review sessions.
To comment on various questions, I have a strategy I use when I take a beta exam. When I reach a question which I would like to make a comment on, I mark the box to review the question. In the old (VUE) system, there were separate boxes to mark for comment and mark for review. In the new (Prometric) system, the mark for review box serves both purposes. So I mark the question for review. On the writing "paper" that I am given, I think make a note of the question number and what I wanted to note about the question. Its hard to remember what you wanted to say about question 4 after you are doing the review following completion of question 89. When I finish the exam, I then tell it to end review. At this point, the commenting screen is presented. You only have a short window of time to enter comments for all of the questions. Try to be helpful but keep your comment short for any questions that you have comments for.
Every comment posted on a question is read verbatim at some point during the beta review process so make sure that your comment is necessary. Useful comments indicate problems with the text of the question or the answer. Try to make sure you indicate three primary things. What is wrong in the question. Why it is wrong. What you suggest doing about it. Again, brevity is key here both for your time in the comment section as well as to ensure that the item review processes are not bogged down with long explanations. Posting comments like "this is fine" or "I like this question" probably are not going to be as useful and will serve more to obscure the points about a question which may raise a concern.
The other primary method to provide direct feedback to Microsoft is invite-only. The exam candidates with the best scores on an exam during beta are usually invited to participate in an item review process at Microsoft to help with prioritizing items and fixes for the folks on the exam team. This is an important step in the process and if you are invited to take part, I would *strongly* encourage seeing what you can do to make that happen. The quality of the exams at release depends in part on the participation of qualified professionals during the beta and review stages. If they have to use less qualified professionals to do the review, the final exam is going to reflect that less qualified point of view and feedback.
Did I Pass?
One of the most frustrating elements of taking an exam in beta is that you do all of this preparation, invest your time in an exam which could be twice the length of the exam when it is released, and then you have to wait months to get your beta scores. Sorry. That's the way it works. Your beta pass/fail will usually be released on the Prometric candidate history about a week before the new exam goes public. Microsoft cannot and will not give you your score before then. During the review process, certain questions are dropped or modified and these changes can impact the beta scores. For that reason, Microsoft decides the fate of each question and then scores the beta tests. Those scores are returned to Prometric who has to update their own system. Prometric's update then kicks off the regular exam-passed process in the Microsoft system.
Taking a beta exam is more work than a regular exam but you do not have to pay for them. I hope you have the opportunity to pass a Microsoft exam in beta soon!