Lukas Beeler's IT Blog

This morning i attended the Beta for Exam 70-680 – i was one of the lucky few that got a seat in this beta.

I already did 70-270 (Windows XP) and 70-620 (Windows Vista) two years ago, and the Vista exam was far too easy for my taste. It took me about 20 minutes, and i walked out with a score about 900. That’s not good – too easy questions will just devalue the certification.

With this in mind, i expected 70-680 to get Microsoft back on track, and they did. The exam has much better and much more difficult questions than 70-620. Not questions which require you to memorize stuff, but questions which require you to understand the subject matter.

As usual for beta exams, there were no simulations, VM tasks or anything else except multiple choice questions. I can understand why that’s the case (they probably want to use the final version for that), but i’m still not entirely with this as it is.

One thing that was new in this exam is that you get a questionary that asks you to judge your knowledge levels on Windows 7 for yourself. Several fields are presented, in which you have to choose between very high, high, mediocre, low and very low skills – another questions asks how much experience you already had with Windows 7 (with options such as “Over a year”).

I think that’s a good idea – most exam betas are open now, which means that many less-skilled people will also attend them. As long as those are truthful, this can actually help to improve the exam.

Unfortunately, i had very much difficulty finding what’s my personal baseline. I opted to choose either High or Mediocre for most answers, but was that correct? What does high mean? What does mediocre mean? What’s my knowledge level?

It might make sense to ask questions which are more task oriented – if you already did a task X and if you think if you’re proficient at doing task X.

The exam content was pretty much what was in the official docs – there’s a lot more focus on using group policies (local ones in this case), and also a few more detailed networking questions regarding Subnetting, in both IPv4 and IPv6.

General list of things i’ve seen:

• New features: BranchCache, DirectAccess and VPN (not overly technical – if you got it to work once, you can answer these)
• Bitlocker – not overly many questions
• Setup – the USB stick install gets featured more
• USMT gets a lot more focus and also Windows EasyTransfer
• Imaging, Deployment, VHDs

I’ll see if i passed the exam in officially 8 weeks, so probably in about 4 real moths ;)