Renew your Microsoft Certification while drinking rosé

The title says it all.

It’s 10PM, my partner and I we have archived to put the kids to bed (they are not sleeping yet) after repeating multiple time phrases like:

Brush your teeth… Put your pyjama on… Did you brush your teeth? …Go to bed… Put your pyjama on… Brush your teeth…

…and so on for 30 minutes.

I’m finally very tired and I’m drinking a glass of rosé while going through my e-mails.

One of the e-mails says: Action required — Your Microsoft Certification will expire in 180 days!

I follow the link and instinctively press on the button Take the renewal assessment… thinking, OK, that might be an assessment to check my knowledge level… instead it was the exam itself…

45 minutes Microsoft? Really?

After 10 minutes I renewed the certification…

I was instinctively happy of the outcome.

But then, thinking twice, I shouldn’t be that happy.

I’ve been working the whole day, I cooked for my family, It’s late at night, I drink a few glass of wine and I’m unprepared for the exam. How could I have passed the exam so easily?

Plus, how can I have a staggering top mark for Explore query performance optimization and a so low mark related to Configure SQL Server resources for optimal performance?

Sounds like Congratulation Francesco, you can perfectly spot what makes a query go slow… but then you cannot fix it…

A Constructive Feedback for Microsoft

Passing a Microsoft Certification doesn’t really represent your knowledge.

True/False exams are lame because they are exams for the masses. Microsoft just want to deliver as much certifications as possible.

I’d rather prefer a true exam in front of a teacher than this exam-for-the-masses.

If Microsoft cannot train an army of teachers a valid alternative could be to organize something similar to SadServers: real-life scenarios where you can really prove how smart you are.

Multiple choice test are over, we learned how to cheat on that in middle school.

And always in middle school we learned that teachers using multiple choice test were teachers who really didn’t care much if we were learning.