70-640 Passed :0

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Passed my 70-640 exam an Tuesday with a score of 894 (an odd score when you try to work to the 004 bit!!)

Have to say I was pleased to have passed let alone get a high mark!

The score only says half of the story as i had at least 15 questions "marked for review" at the end and I was really not looking forward to this one, but the Gods were smiling on me that day!

One reason why I was not feeling this exam was that I had read that there was a lot of questions regarding Certificate Services than 15% specified by "skills measured" set by MS. I don't work day to day with certs and the info just wouldn't stick!

For those doing the exam now, I'd say that the exam was more rounded (maybe there had been complaints?).

Learn your tools, what they do, when to use them. And really really really take the time to look things up on Technet as the book covers a lot of detail but leaves some important details out. (For example some tools only work with server 2008 and not 2003. Maybe obvious to some, but I entered the IT fray at server 2008!)

Next - 70-646 (and that is it for a long while!)

ATB
G

 

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Congrats! I'll be doing the exam soon myself, just finishing up the book then on to MeasureUp practice questions followed by exam!

 

Cheers mate!

The measure up tests on the disk given with the book are ok, although they never seem to translate to he exam in my experience. For the exam, I'd look at technet to get the answers to some of the more "obscure" questions, but his seems to be the case for all MS exams though!

I don't know why, but Technet seems to be a bit more to the point than the books. e.g. Tool X only works with 2008. Cheers MS Press for *not* mentioning that (in big bold lettering) - unless, I'm being totally thick!

Sorry if I'm teaching you to suck eggs!

G

- - - Updated - - -

Cheers.
This exam was 8 months in the making so, I'm, glad I passed more than anything. The score was helped hours of studying, luck and MS asking me the same question more than once, but in a different way - which is a nice little bonus!

G

 

I am actually using Exam Cram for this test... I've been using server 2008 for a while now, I just need to go over it quickly to avoid any surprises on the exam and hopefully pass!

 

congrats - it is a beast of an exam

 

Congrats

NB

 

Well done dude, il be trying to make a start on this soon!

 

Well done!

I know it's not much use, but cert services used to be a pain for me too up until I got involved with Lync 2010. Rolling out Lync at work really got my cert services knowledge up to speed, so the CS questions on 640 were not as challenging for me! However, ADFS and LDS were quite a challenge for me!

 

I'm struggling through the AD CS chapter right now. Been through it once and hit a brick wall, am going to go through again after watching the nuggets videos. Some of it makes sense now but I'll be honest and I'm ****ting myself for the exam as there is just so much to remember.

 

If the "skills measured" doc says that certificate services is 15% of the knowledge needed for this exam, it means it.

You might have 30% of the questions in your exam on this topic, or just a single question. Whichever it is, all the questions on that topic will have their marks "weighted" so that the value of your final score attributed to this area is 150 marks out of the possible 1000. So if 30% of q's are on this they would each be worth roughly 0.5% of the whole exam. A single question on it would mean that was worth 15% on its own (which is why it is very unlikely you would get so few).
This is why MS keep banging on the drum to say that the passing mark is not "70%" as that leads people to thinking that if they have 75 questions (not far off for most tech exams) then you need to get 70% * 75 = 53 correct for a pass. But it is so much more complicated than that because of the weighting. You could fail with 54 correct questions or pass with 45 - it depends which ones are which.

If you get no correct answers on certificates (as an example), you will lose 150 marks out of 1000, regardless of whether that is 1 asked and incorrect or 10 asked and incorrect.

If they change how much importance they believe a subject has in the real world, they change the "Objective domain" which describes what topics are included in the exam and is described, along with weightings in the "skills measured" doc. This does not often happen within versions, but can be seen between product versions for example as old skills get overtaken by need for newer ways of doing things.

Things are also slightly more complicated by things like questions which do not count for marks, so you can't tell if every question asked is counted towards your 1000 eventual marks. Sometimes new questions can be tried out this way - if most people who pass get a test question right, and most who fail get that question wrong, it is a reasonable question to distinguish the two groups. If lots of people who show they have the right level of knowledge by getting a pass mark get a particular question wrong, then that question must be badly worded, misleading or tricksy in some way. Vice versa if loads of people fail the exam but get a question right, it must be too easy to guess without having the knowledge required by the subject.

 

@ Adam V
A rather belated "thank you" for your informative post

G

 

Damn, im hoping to do it in less than that, reading the books are like me stuck in quick sand, Im using video nuggets and hopefully will be able to pull of a result within a few weeks...

Congratulations on the pass, means there is hope for us all