Two things to consider when judging the quality of an examination:
1. the level of technical know-how of the author or authors.
2. the skill in technical writing. It takes good grasp of technical writing to produce quality examination. IMO, I am not an author of a book, but the only difference between exam and a book is that: BOOK - author gives you the answer. EXAM - author asks you if you know the answer.

In addition, the examination is the 'standard' of the authors - it might be low or high to some. Here in East Asia, the exam is quite fair - not easy not difficult - maybe because of the language barrier.

The exam is just for fun, if it's easy, good for you. If you failed, take another chance. It's one way of learning also.

>Craig,
>
>1. I agree that the lack of supervision makes the certification pretty much useless to a third party, but it doesn't impact on self assessment.
>
>2. I approve of the idea of being able to look things up - as long as you can do so in a reasonable time frame. The test I did allowed 3 min per question. Plenty of time to go to the command window or the help file if you knew what you were doing - not enough if you didn't. In my day to day work, I refer to the docs and small tess in the command window all the time. I'm not sure that that makes me less of a VFP programmer.
>
>3. I agree that the test seemed aimed a bit low. I did it early on a sunday morning with a squirming 6 month old sitting on my lap competing for attention and still managed to get a good score. 40 easy syntax questions are not really a good test of a programmer.
>
>All-in-all I guess we're 2 and 1 on the points I raised here.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Andrew
>

---

>>
>>I took it sometime ago...don't remember my score. I kept getting connection errors through the whole thing. I'm not surprised my score didn't get posted. My thoughts through the whole thing were that I would not put any value on a cert test given over the web and that asked lots of syntax questions. Too easy to look up answers.