Livejournal's Certification Community

Someone asked a couple of entries ago about answering questions about experience, and someone resonded saying they tell the truth, and they think it's probably used to determine the difficulty level for future questions. I was going to reply there, but then thought it might be of interest to other folks, and they probably wouldn't see it in a reply.

I work for Sun Microsystems and recently got to participate in creating the new Business Component Developer certification exam (basically, the new EJB certification exam) - it just finished its beta, and should be out in a month or so (I think.)

One of the things that is determined from comparing experience to results is the value of a question, rather than its difficulty. For example, if a lot of experienced people are going down the wrong path with a particular question, then it may well be thrown out or rewritten for clarity. This is also matched up with how they did on other questions, so a lie in experience level here and there isn't really that likely to skew things.

The psychometrics of the exam stuff was really interesting to learn about!

Happy to answer questions if anyone has them :)

Yep, got me my MCSD (6.0 track). Passed C++ desktop and distributed today--by the skin of my teeth. I had decent general knowledge going in...my 1st "cold" transcender exam on each was around 500--but that's not a pass.

A little fine tuning to make sure I was getting consistent pass results on the transcenders...which definitely saved my bacon from a retest!

581 vs 534 on 70-016 and 600 vs 540 on 70-015.

This also qualifies me for my free 70-300 voucher and it's time to start all over on the MCSD 2003 track. Heh.

Hey--anyone know how to get/make the combined MCSD/MCSE logo that has both certs listed under the logo? The logo guidelines are somewhat vague on how to accomplish it.