>At first, you'd want to agree with Walter

Go wash out your mouth with soap!!!! < g >

>what if MS offered its MCP free of charge, and on the net?

Unless MS became a charity organization, it won't happen. It's expensive to develop an exam; there's a full-time staff of editors and coordinators, statisticians, not to mention that they pay the SMEs. Once a test is released, there is ongoing development of new material for the exam so that it doesn't have a fixed set of answers that can be easily memorized; I believe that MS was talking about 50% turnover of material annually. And there's infrastructure to manage the MCP and other professional certifications as well. Not inexpensive, at least not from my POV.

And as you said, it devalues once the content was exposed - take the exam once, sit down with yer buds, run through all the questions, go back, retake, etc...the value of the certiciation approaches null...

I'd offer you a psychotropic substance, but they all seem to be in use by others at the moment...perhaps later?