There is a great post over on the Born to learn blog about choosing the ‘most correct’ answer on exams.  Specifically the author is addressing the sometimes confusing multiple-choice type questions often found on PRO level Microsoft certifications.  These are often preceded by a lengthy scenario describing some type of business requirements, of which some or none may be relevant to the actual question at hand.  For someone taking their first PRO level Microsoft certification exam this can be quite stressful.  I remember taking the 70-646 MCITP: System Administrator exam and having covered both sides of my two pieces of note paper only 5 or 6 questions in.  I firmly believe that the path to successfully passing ANY exam is about 33% knowing the material, 33% exam preparation and about 33% test taking skills.  If you figure the average passing rate on any given Microsoft exam is about 70% – only knowing two of the three skills will fail you with a 66%.

InformIT has a great podcast series called On Certification – which goes over exam preparation, including test taking skills on an exam by exam basis. Unfortunately it isn’t updated very frequently – but the video for 70-640: Windows Server Active Directory (here) albeit now two years old, still contains some great information for both that exam and Microsoft exams in general.

I’ve been helping to lead a study group of my co-workers as we prepare to take the 70-668 exam – being a PRO level exam – the first many of the participants have taken – there is a large amount of anxiety of the question format and types.  There is a practice test at Accelerated-Ideas and while the content of the questions is useful the format is anything but.  To help the group I’ve been taking some of the practice questions from that exam and ‘transforming’ them into typical PRO level questions.  Even going so far as to step through my logic and though patterns.  When reading any PRO level Microsoft exam question I usually read the two or three sentences directly above the answers, the one generally asking the question, followed the answers, then the whole thing from top to bottom.