Four steps for Pass Microsoft certification exams easily

How to pass Microsoft certification exams easily :

Microsoft certification exams are usually hard, really hard. They are generally not very fun to take. The exams dive into minutia, asking questions that people with years of experience can’t answer. Every question is a trick question so they are pretty hard to guess at. So, how do you know what will be on the exam? The scary answer is that you can’t, at least not everything. No matter how much you study, you will likely encounter questions you have never seen any material on (more about this later). However, breathe a sigh of relief because there is one place to go to find out most of the topics that will be on an exam. Microsoft publishes exam description pages for every exam they administer.

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Find good study material.

You need really good material to study. Here, I have an advantage. As a Microsoft Certified Trainer I have access to Microsoft Official Curriculum (MOC) content. The MOC content is used in official Microsoft courses is written by experts in the field and tends to align with the objectives in the exams. This doesn’t mean that exam questions will be written word for word directly from the content, but most of the concepts on the exam are covered in detail in the MOC course content. I have had students swear that a concept on the exam wasn’t covered in the MOC content only to go back and find that they had missed it or forgotten it. This is where having a list of skills is useful. I use the skills list as a guide to the content.

If you do not have the ability to take a Microsoft official course then there are a myriad of books out there as study guides. Be careful thought to get a study guide from a legitimate source.

Make NOTES:

The act of writing (or typing) the information fixes it in my short-term memory. I have heard that there is actually science behind this, but I have never bothered to look it up because, well, it just works. If only I had discovered this before my last semester in college.

Practice Every Day:

With all due respect to a certain former professional basketball player, practice matters. There are two forms of practice — technology practice and exam practice. It is important to actually set up and manage a system that you are taking a certification exam on. Likewise, it is important to develop some test-taking skills and have some understanding of what to expect when taking an exam.

Manage your time:

When you start an exam you will be given the total number of questions and the amount of time available. Do a quick calculation (you will have something to write on) and figure out how much time you have per question. While I don’t time myself on each question, I keep this in the back on my mind to make sure that I do not run out of time. I know a lot of exam candidates who have failed because they realized that they ran out of time and guessed at a number of questions.