How to pass any MCP exam
One of the questions that I get asked a lot is how to pass particular MCP exams. I now have completed 13 of them, so feel somewhat qualified to offer some of the ways that I use to make sure I am fully prepared for them.
Having said this, Fred Baumhardt from MS has claim to 34 MCP's so I am well and truly trumped by him (check out his blog http://blogs.technet.com/fred/default.aspx).
Interestingly do you know the most failed (in %) MCP exam? You may be suprised to learn that it is the ISA exam (70-350).
As this was the last exam I passed, let me give you some tips on passing any MCP.
First of all, I normally read the entire MS Press book (yes cover to cover). I generally cover a chapter every 2 days (takes about 1.5 hours a day).
I then make sure I feel comfortable with all the 'hands on' excercises. Some of them are brainless, but others are quite useful (such as setting up a bridged SSL tunnel to publish Outlook Web Access).
After having done this, I generally try and read some of the white papers and case studies to get a feel of how the technology works 'in the real world'.
Transcenders are superb, and I used them for the first 6 exams, after a while though, you get a feel for the type of questions you are likely to get asked, and transcenders are generally a lot harder than the actual exam.
One final thing, if there is a new technology introduced with an OS or within a field (Printer pooling, Incremental DNS transfers, DNS stub zones, Application Partitions, incremental GC replication, Cross Forest Trusts, Selective Authentication, SID filtering, Command Line Interface commands (Dsadd,DSrm,ntdsutil), GPupdate vs secedit /refreshpolicy), then pay particular attention to these. Like any good company, MS are great at marketing new features and they do feature heavily in the exams.
Hope this has been useful without breaching the MS Non Disclosure Agreement!
Having said this, Fred Baumhardt from MS has claim to 34 MCP's so I am well and truly trumped by him (check out his blog http://blogs.technet.com/fred/default.aspx).
Interestingly do you know the most failed (in %) MCP exam? You may be suprised to learn that it is the ISA exam (70-350).
As this was the last exam I passed, let me give you some tips on passing any MCP.
First of all, I normally read the entire MS Press book (yes cover to cover). I generally cover a chapter every 2 days (takes about 1.5 hours a day).
I then make sure I feel comfortable with all the 'hands on' excercises. Some of them are brainless, but others are quite useful (such as setting up a bridged SSL tunnel to publish Outlook Web Access).
After having done this, I generally try and read some of the white papers and case studies to get a feel of how the technology works 'in the real world'.
Transcenders are superb, and I used them for the first 6 exams, after a while though, you get a feel for the type of questions you are likely to get asked, and transcenders are generally a lot harder than the actual exam.
One final thing, if there is a new technology introduced with an OS or within a field (Printer pooling, Incremental DNS transfers, DNS stub zones, Application Partitions, incremental GC replication, Cross Forest Trusts, Selective Authentication, SID filtering, Command Line Interface commands (Dsadd,DSrm,ntdsutil), GPupdate vs secedit /refreshpolicy), then pay particular attention to these. Like any good company, MS are great at marketing new features and they do feature heavily in the exams.
Hope this has been useful without breaching the MS Non Disclosure Agreement!
posted by Paul Vincent at 11:03 AM
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1 Comments:
Hi there, my name is CM and I am a female from Virginia Beach, VA. USA. I graduated with an associates in Networking and failed to do any exams. So now, I am starting the track to gain my exams. I have tested A+, I would like any advice that you can offer to us readers that are just now starting off. I did not think IT was for me, as I want to do pharmacy, but did not want to put in the 6 years of school. Now that I am older and have a decent job, I plan to do IT certs first, then move up to pharmacy once I have great career skills. I need to test to get those skills.
>Cheers!
CM
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